Ask anyone who is worth their salt in the article marketing world what the most important aspect of any successful campaign is, and most of them will tell you the same answer without a second thought -- RESEARCH. Research is like the foundation of a house. Without a solid research, your campaign will crumble. Everything from finding your keywords, to seeing what your audience wants or needs, to content for your articles -- all revolves around doing proper research.
That being said, research doesn't have to be complicated. I don't mean this to say that it isn't important, as I think this is the most important step. If you lack in research, Stacker 3 you will lack in results. Guaranteed. So that being said my first course of action is to find a product to promote. Now, this goes against what a lot of gurus recommend. Many would have you find an audience with a need first. I've tried that, and ended up doing hours and hours of research for a sub-par product, as there wasn't a decent product available. So find your product first. There are several affiliate programs online where you can look for these. A popular site for beginners is ClickBank.
Once you have found your product, you need to find your keywords to write for. For this, I like to use two tools which are free to use. These tools are SEO Book's Keyword tool, and Google's External keyword tool. Both of these will provide you with as much information as you need to find keywords to write around. As the Google keyword tool is what I use primarily, I will explain how I use this effectively in my campaigns.
First of all, the tool will ask you how you would like to generate keyword ideas. Your options are "Descriptive words or phrases" or "Website content". Choose "Website content". Once you have done that, copy and paste the URL for the landing page of the product you are promoting. Then in the area where it says "Enter one keyword or phrase per line" paste that URL. Below that is an area where it will ask you to type in a captcha, which is basically a non-sensical word whose purpose is to just make sure that you are human, and not a computer.
Then click on "Get keyword ideas". This will return to you a list of keywords that Google deems relevant to that web page. In the far right column you will see a drop down menu labeled "Match Type". This defaults to "broad". "Broad" isn't relevant for us, as this will give you a list of search terms that have those words occur anywhere within the term. For example, if the results say "car tires", that would also be included in "buy car tires" or "replace car tires" etc. For our purposes, we will use "exact". This is much more precise for the information we need. Using our above example, if in the results it says "car tires", that means that that is exactly what the searcher searched for. Some people find this confusing at first, so just remember that for article marketing to use "exact" in the "Match Type" menu.
The next thing that you want to change is, where is says "Results are tailored to English, United States" click on the "edit button right beside it. You will see two columns when you do this. The column on the left is a list of languages. Leave this on "English" (unless you are going to write your articles in a different language that is!). In the column beside it though, change it from "United States" to "All Countries and Territories". If the searcher types in a search phrase in English, it doesn't matter what country he or she is from does it? If you are selling a digital product from ClickBank or a similar affiliate marketplace, it can be bought from anywhere on earth, so don't exclude the rest of the world in your results as they could total a significant number of searches. You want to know everyone on the planet that searches for that term, not just people from one country.
The list of results has four main columns: Keywords, Advertiser Competition, Local Search Volume, and Global Monthly Search. These are all important in deciding which keyword you would like to rank for. Evaluating the information in each of these columns will let you know how easy that would be. Here is what you need to know about each column:
Keywords -- This is obviously the keyword results that Google thought that particular web page was about. This is important, as Google is the biggest search engine in this game, and they are providing to you a list of keywords that it thinks is important and relevant. Relevancy is HUGE in Google's eyes. Your page MUST be relevant to the page that you are linking to (the merchant page), to get a decent rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). If the keyword you choose isn't relevant, then your article could be on page fifty-three of the SERPs (or worse), which nobody will ever see.
Advertiser Competition -- This column confuses a lot of newbies. This refers to paid competition (PPC or Pay Per Click), and not to the organic (free) results. You as an article marketer should find this interesting though, as it shows you how many people are paying to promote that keyword. If you can find a low competition/ high search volume search term, with a lot of people paying to advertise for these terms, you've hit the jackpot. If people are paying for these keywords, that usually means money is being made with them. If you can rank for these keywords on the first page of Google for free, you're ahead of the game.
Local Search Volume -- Local search volume refers to how many times that keyword has been searched for, for the month listed. Pretty straight forward. Depending on who you ask, you'll get varying opinions on what you want the search volume to be. For me personally, if all of your other research elements are done correctly and you are targeting the right group of people with your articles, a search volume of around 600 should be plenty. That's twenty people a day that are looking for a solution to their problem that you are going to provide for them. There is plenty of opportunity for sales with this amount of searches. Some people won't go for any less than 1000 searches a month. Decide for yourself what works for you and adjust as necessary.
Global Monthly Search Volume -- The only difference between this and the "Local Search Volume" column, is that this takes total amount of searches for the last year and divides it by twelve. This gives you the average monthly search volume, as opposed to the actual amount of searches for the month as in the previous column. How do these two columns help you? Well if you see that the the number in the "Local Search Volume" is much lower than the number in the "Global Monthly Search Volume" column, then you may want to find a different keyword, as this could be on a declining trend, or was possibly a quick fad that has hit it's peak and interest is declining.
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