SEO tips: selecting keywords for online income

Getting good keywords is the first step to generate online income. There have been many articles around the Web that teaches you how to do it. For me, I have developed my own system for gatehring these good keywords that are targeted at helping me earn a passive online income. These are my methods. They are not a sure fire way to get rich but they helped me a lot to spot keywords.

The common method people used is to go to places like Google keyword tool and type in a keyword like iphone for example. The tool will then give you a list of long tail keywords and their associated CPCs, search volume, etc. While useful, almost every internet marketing guy is using the same method so you can be assured that most of the good keywords are already saturated with competition. That is why I don't use this method solely.

Here is the one other method that I used. I will talk about the rest in future posts.

Letting Google tell you how to select keywords for your blog.

First, you need to select a keyword that has tons of traffic. Go to google keyword tool and just type in your keyword. Under the 'match type' category, go for 'broad'. This will tell you the total search volume that contains your keyword. Basically it is a sumed total of all phases that people search for that has the word iphone. People can type in iphone accessories, iphone jailbreak, iphone api, iphone games, etc. It doesn't really matter. Google will sum it all up and tell you the total if you used the 'board' category. For this, you are going for keywords with high search volume, preferably beyond a million.

Next, change your 'match type' settings to 'exact'. This will then give you the search volume for for that exact keyword. For example, if you use the 'exact' option on the keyword 'iphone', the search volume result that the tool gives you is only for searches that use the exact word 'iphone' and not other things like 'iphone API' etc. The nice thing about the Google keyword tool is that it will also give the exact search volume for the related keywords. Say, you type in iPhone into the Google keyword tool and choose the exact option. The result will not only show you the exact search volume for iPhone but also for related keyword like 'iPhone games', ' iPhone APIs', 'How to jailbreak iPhone' etc. What you need to do next is then sum up the exact search volume for your main keyword and all the related keywords that the tool is showing you. You can do this by importing the result page into an excel sheet. There is option at the end of the result page where you will see an import function.

So, what you have now are 2 things: (i) the broad search volume for your main keyword and (ii) the exact search volume for your main as well as related keywords. If there is a big difference between the 2, then it means there might be keywords which the tool is not giving you but has significant search volume. For example, let's say the broad search volume for iPhone is 20 million but the sum of all the exact search is only 18 million. That means there is about 2 million searches being done for iphone related keywords that the tool is not telling you. Among these, there might be gems that are bring in 10,000 or 20,000 unique searches per month. What you need to do is to fish them out. How?

This is can be accomplished by writing super long articles. They should be at least 4000-10,000 words. For example, in the iPhone example, I would write a long articles about iPhone that rambles about everything I could think of about the device. It can be iphone batteries, how to maintain iphone, how to clean iphone earplugs, where to buy iphone accessories, etc. The important thing is to keep it long and put in as many related iPhone keywords within the post as you can. I don't mean keyword stuffing until it becomes unreadable but do it in such a way that it is natural. In this article, I have already included so many iPhone related keywords, does it feel keyword stuffed to you?

Then you publish the blog post and wait for a few days (I assumed your site is already indexed). There should be long tail traffic that Google will start sending you. Keep an eye out for these long tail keywords because they will point you to those gem keyword that I talk about. This is how I discovered keywords. Typically these keywords will not have much competition because you cannot find them appearing in Google keyword tool when you do a broad category search like iPhone.

Once I have these keywords then the fun begins. I first decide on my monetisation methods to beginning making online income. Typically, I like Adsense but some keywords doesn't have advertisers (because the Google keyword tool doesn't show these advertisers what to bid for as well LOL). Then, I will look for affiliate products. If it is information based, you can try Clickbank where there are tons of information products (You can also create your own information product btw if it is not available in the market). If it is physical, then Amazon will be my first store. I then build my income generating site according to the type of monetisation method I used.

In summary, that is how I select keywords to make online income.

Posted in: seo tips