Each day I go on the hunt for profitable keywords for my sites.
I have been doing this daily task for years and have come to
enjoy the simple steps I take to find profitable keywords.
It has become so enjoyable because I know with each valuable
keyword I find I am adding hundreds, sometimes even thousands
to my yearly online income.
Keywords power much of the online traffic and commerce on
the web. Keywords are the exact word or phrase surfers type
into search engines to find what they're looking for on the
Internet. They are the essential elements in your website's
profitability and in many cases keywords will largely
determine how much revenue you earn from the web.
Finding profitable keywords is not a difficult task, anyone
can use popular online sites and tools to find valuable and
profitable keywords with a few minutes of work. Quick, easy
and simple. You just have to know how to find the answers to
these three questions:
1. How Many Searches Are Made Each Month For Your Keyword?
A keyword that receives no searches is worthless. A keyword
which receives just 10 to 100 searches each month may be very
profitable. Your first task is to find out or discover HOW MANY
SEARCHES are made each month for your keyword or keyword phrase.
You can use sites like Overture (Yahoo Marketing) or WordTracker
and they will give you the number of searches made each month
and also variations of your keyword phrase. For quick reference
I use this site: http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/
Once you know how many searches are made for your keyword you
can determine how much traffic you will receive if your site
lands on the first page SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
The closer you are to the number one spot will determine
the percentage of these monthly searches you will receive.
Most of your traffic will come from Google, even if you get
#1 spots in all three major engines, Yahoo and MSN will
return less traffic - at least this has been my experience.
Keep in mind, even keywords with low search numbers may still
be profitable. For example, 'unique corporate gift ideas'
only has around 400 searches but this may be very profitable
for companies or websites that cater to corporate gifts.
Also remember, some keyword searches are seasonal, i.e. the
number of searches made for 'valentine gifts' in July will
greatly differ from those made in February.
2. How Much Competition Does Your Keyword Have?
You must know the level of competition for each keyword
phrase you target with your online marketing. Extremely
competitive keywords are not worth your time because
you will not place for these keywords on the SERPs
and you will get no traffic. As a general rule, the
most popular keywords with 100's of thousands of
searches a month will have the stiffest competition.
You can still place for very competitive keywords but
it may require months, usually years of content/link
building. Unless you use a PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising
system such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Marketing; you
won't get any traffic from extremely competitive keywords.
It's best to target keywords with little or no competition.
One of the best sites to use to find out your keyword's
competition is Google. If you type your keyword phrase
'corporate gift ideas' into Google search you will see
there are 7,660,000 pages/listings returned. To get
the number of pages that have your exact keyword phrase,
you need to search your phrase within quotation marks
"corporate gift ideas" and you will see it has around
275,000 pages featuring your keyword phrase.
If you check out the sites on the first three pages of
listings you can determine the level of your competition.
I use the professional keyword research software
Keyword Elite to determine my competition. But here's a
quick way to check the PR (Page Rank) of the listings for
your keyword phrase. Let's run thru an example.
First do a search in Google for 'corporate gift ideas' and
then highlight and copy the return url.
Next go to this site http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank
and paste in your Google keyword return url:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=corporate+gift
+ideas&btnG=Search
This will give you a quick visual pagerank of all your
chosen keyword's Top 10 competitors!
3. How To Know If Your Keyword Is Really Profitable?
One quick and simple way to tell if your keyword
is profitable, i.e. people are making money from
promoting and optimizing your chosen keyword phrase.
Take your keyword phrase and type it into Google, Yahoo
and MSN. Just count the number of Sponsored Links at
the top of the page and at the sides. If your keyword
phrase is profitable you will see a lot of sponsored
links, which means sites/businesses are advertising.
Where there is advertising, there is profit!
You can use Yahoo advertising (Overture) to discover
the amount each advertiser is welling to pay for
each click or visitor to their keyword phrase;
this amount can range from $.10 to $10 to $100
per click!
I use the keyword software mentioned above to monitor
the different sites promoting my keywords. If my
competitors are buying PPC advertising month after
month, you know this keyword phrase is profitable
for them and chances are it can be also profitable
for you.
Many savvy Internet Marketers instead of targeting
extremely popular keywords, find a niche market and
target a whole string of related keywords that have
little or no competition. This Long Tail marketing
method can prove very profitable.
How profitable will largely depend on what you do with
your keyword traffic, how well you can convert this
traffic into a sale or how well you can monetize it
with affiliate programs or Google Adsense?
Just follow these three easy steps for finding profitable
keywords and you will have a simple system for adding
valuable keywords to your site or online marketing.
Take full advantage of these little income magnets which
powers so much of the commerce done online and you will
succeed. Always remember, these little nuggets of gold
are yours for the taking.
...
The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous niche websites, including two sites on Internet marketing. For the latest web marketing tools try: Internet Marketing Tools For the latest Internet Marketing Strategies go here: Internet Marketing Strategies
Copyright © 2006 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.
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