On July 27th, I started a very interesting experiment. I decided to find 100 keywords that weren’t super competitive, write blog posts about them on one of my blogs, and track the results. I believed that if I chose the right keywords, I could create a lot of extra income.
The experiment produced great results:
- During the first week, the experiment produced $371.98.
- During the second week, the experiment produced $678.62.
- During the third week, the experiment produced $780.40.
- During the last 9 days, the experiment produced $848.59.
That means that the grand total of the 30 days was $2,679.59:
Obviously I’m pretty happy about how well the experiment went. It goes to show that know which keywords to post about can go a long way.
Now that this experiment is said and done, I can offer some advice for people who are thinking about taking on a project like this. There are a few things that come to mind:
- Spend enough time on the research phase. Choosing the right keywords is key. If you have keywords that are too difficult, it will be pretty difficult to get amazing results. If you have worthless keywords, they won’t produce any income, even if they produce traffic (You can use the Adwords Tool to look at the prices advertisers are buying traffic for).
- Learn how to write well. I’m not saying that I’m a world class writer. I know that I’m not. However, I try hard to write posts that will give people the information that they are looking for. I can tell you that I get a lot of natural links because of that and it makes all the difference in the world. If you can learn how to write what people are looking for, you’ll be better off in the long run.
- Consider keywords when you write. I would still focus on writing what people are looking for, but it would be completely stupid to not include your keyword(s) in your writing. I try not to think about keyword density and that stuff – I simply make sure that my keywords can be found within my blog posts.
- Stretch yourself. Doing a lot of writing is difficult for anyone. However, volume is a key aspect of the game and the more content you have, the easier it is to get traffic.
- Continue to develop your sites. There are a lot of people out there who jump from site to site to site and there are some fundamental problems with that. In order to really get a site to perform well you have to continue to develop it over time. As time passes it starts to work in your favor, as long as you continue to develop. People usually quit before they get that far but if you can get there, you can make some pretty crazy things happen.
The biggest lesson that I learned through this experiment is that volume matters. It isn’t the only thing that matters, but it matters. It seems that most of us don’t push ourselves as much as we should to accomplish more and sometimes it takes a challenge or an experiment like this to get us to actually perform.
Tags: blog posts, Content, make money
When you say you chose keywords that wernt competitive, does this mean the “green” keywords that KWA is known to teach about or does this mean easy green keywords.
Thanks James.
I meant the keywords we call green in the members’ area James!
Looks like the experiment was definitely a success! Thanks for sharing your tips and letting us follow your progress. I still plan to do my own project like this but have yet to get started.
Awesome ending to a great experiment! I was wondering if your 100 keywords were all relevant to the websites theme keyword, or if the 100 keywords were all on scattered topics using profitable keywords.
Thanks,
Charles
They were all relevant Charles!
There’s an old saying: “Write what you know” – and what you write about will resonate with your readers. Start with topics and keywords you have at least _some_ passion, curiosity, and genuine interest in. Even if your knowledge is somewhat thin – as you research and write and learn more you’ll grow your authority on the subject and inevitably write BETTER with a more natural tone. And it becomes easier to post with the stronger vocabulary you build around the subject.
Mark, the letters in your email newsletter are really tiny. I mean, tiny.
I second that! Awesome finale, Court. It’s inspirational.
Me three! I think it is a way to make us come here to read the actual post
)
/Mikael
It really is all about writing good useful content, and lots of it, using keywords that you can dominate fairly quickly, if it’s search engine traffic you want (and who doesn’t!)
Great post court, I will have my supersite up within the next few weeks. I can’t wait to see how it does.
Wow! That’s great inspiration!
Are you doing this from a)an aged domain b)site with alot of previous content c)site with alot of existing backlinks or d)site with alot of PR. If you did it with a fresh site, then its impressive.
Great experiment for us to learn from. I’m curious about the following,
1. What were the average lengths of your posts?
2. Did you use a minimum dollar amount when calculating the income potential of your green keywords for this experiment?
3. When selecting the niche to base your experiment on, was it one you already had knowledge of, or was it something you had to research prior to writing your posts?
Thanks again for sharing your results.
Lee
Lee the post length varied wildly and isn’t really important. What is important is that you give the searcher what they are looking for.
All of my keywords were worth more than $50 per month.
I had knowledge and I had to research, so both I guess!
So….whats the URL Court?? ;0) haha just kidding.
You mentioned write well, so out of all these posts did you outsource any of your content(If you wrote about this in your other updates, i apologize, i havent read them)?
I ended up outsourcing a few. The ones I outsourced are really well done though. They cost close to $30 a piece.
Awesome job Court! Looking forward to duplicating the results!!! =P
Court, in the process how many EzineArticles did you manage to write for link purposes?
Let’s see it was exactly…. zero.
Damn. I gotta try this. Even if I need to outsource at $30 per article this could still turn into a profit in a couple of months.
That is pretty good results. Nice work. Greg Ellison
Wow, really big success you have here. And thanks for sharing the tips.
Great results. Just goes to show the power of getting off your butt and doing it.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi Court,
Great results. I’d like to ask you the following:
1. Did you have a decent amount of traffic to start off with?
2. How did you get the word out there about your new articles? Any particular places you syndicated your content to, to be picked up and linked to by others?
Thanks!
1. I had a couple hundred visitors per day.
2. I didn’t. The traffic came from search engines.
Wow! I was impressed! Is this an income from adsense? I wonder how did you choose your keywords. Finding the right keywords is difficult nowadays.
We have to search for keywords which have a huge amount of traffic in Google Trends yet when we type it in Google, it should have less competition as to the results.
Yes, 100% Adsense. Our membership area goes over how I selected the keywords. You can get what you’re looking for for the extremely high price of $1.
I don’t use Google trends because I don’t go after temporary traffic.
Like everyone else here I am very impressed with your results. It does give us hope that we can duplicate your results and earn some profits for ourselves. Will keep an eye out for other updates.
Court,
You’ve said in the past to use worthless long tail keywords as well. For SEO reasons ofcourse.
Is it not true that when you get some traffic for a worthless keyword, Adsense will still show ads for the short tail keyword that’s part of your long tail?
You can still get nice CPC for that I think. What do you think?
Jay
I would only use keywords with low CPCs to supplement keywords with more value.
So if we don’t target too-competitive keywords, and instead target long tail keywords, how do you then get enough traffic from LT keywords to get these kinds of results? Instead of just a couple hits a day? I can’t get my daily hits over 20 even though I’m ranking in the SERPS for my LT keywords. do you just go after dozens of LTs with all your 100 posts? Thanks
.
That tells me that your LT keywords don’t have enough search volume.
I found one solid LT keyword for each post. I figure out beforehand how much I think I can make with each keyword, and then go from there.
thanks for the reply – that cleared up a lot for me. it would be neat to see how these are doing 60, 90 days out too, to see if traffic continues to grow.
i’m going to try out the KWA trial, sounds like there’s more good stuff where this came from
I am very impressed with your ability to earn an income with adsense. Although it takes a little work…it is an excellent blueprint for success.
Hi Court,
I joined the course but even if logged in the Pro Area I receive a message that the pages are protected. How long does it take to activate full access?
Thanks and Regards.
Hey Fabio,
Send an email to support[at]thekeywordacademy[dot]com. We have someone who takes care of this type of thing!
Hi Court,
You mentioned about 100 keywords were used, but how many blog posts did you post?
In the end, did you end with exactly 100 posts for this project? or was it substantially more than 100 posts or less than 100 posts?
I actually published 100 posts Mike!
Hi Court,
Recently I ran into this delmna where the numbers I get now for my keyword(s) from the Google Adwords Tool (global search volume and average CPC) are drastically different values than it produced six months ago. Recently, the average CPC dropped by more than 50% for one of my keywords. Although, the average search volume had increased by 1100.
I was wondering if you’ve ever encountered shifts in CPC over time on any of your keywords.
Thanks,
Marcus
Marcus that will happen to everyone. Some will shift higher and some will shift lower. If you have a bunch of profitable keywords, you won’t care about variations.
When you do something like this, don’t all 100 posts end up being pretty much the same content over and over? I assume all 100 posts are for closely related keywords, so you’ve got, for example, “free credit cards,” “no fee credit cards,” “no annual fee credit cards” and similar posts 100 times over? I’m just trying to understand the process. Thanks, and great results.
There is plenty of difference in my keywords. However, even if they were close I could still make it work. I would do one at a time, providing what the searcher was looking for.
Awesome results, congratulations! I’m still committed to the experiment, and I’ve selected this site to run up the 100 new posts. I’ve been off line for about a month due to a move but will be back up to speed shortly. Thanks again!
Did you just mine your keywords Court? Amazing how many goodies you can find in your stat logs.
I wanted to make a note on your “green” keywords idea though. It is highly inaccurate. Google keyword tool shows you how many impressions there are on the content network over the month for that particular keyword, not the amount of times a search is done on the google engine. Usually this is vastly overstated compared to the amount of times a search is conducted. I know this as a result of getting to the top of the engines for a couple terms that proceeded to deliver to me almost no traffic.
If you want to know the number, you have to know average adwords CTR in a niche and then base your guess off of the Adwords Traffic Estimator. Or you can simply run an adwords campaign making sure you are in the bottom slots so you almost never get clicked on. You can test out a keyword for under $5.00. I have done it for free before on less competitive terms.
Sometimes the keyword tool is correct, but it is just as likely to be off.
I would appreciate it if you left me your name when you comment.
Actually, the Adwords tool doesn’t use the content network for its stats. It uses the entire search network. There’s a huge difference between the search network and the content network.
I know that you’re just trying to be helpful, but what you’re saying isn’t true. If you read the documentation for the tool, you’ll see this:
It sounds to me like you’re probably not using the tool correctly. Are you already a member here? If so, did you use the tool exactly as instructed?
On top of that, there are a lot of keywords out there that webmasters are in love with. This means that you can get to the top of the SERPs and get very few clicks, because all of the searchers are webmasters searching.
I’m not saying the tool is perfect, I know it isn’t. I have a huge amount of data to look at – thousands of different rankings and those rankings allow me to see what’s happening.
“On top of that, there are a lot of keywords out there that webmasters are in love with. This means that you can get to the top of the SERPs and get very few clicks, because all of the searchers are webmasters searching.”
– that had me rolling Court. It’s another reason to brainstorm niches well outside making money online and subjects that web-savvy people obsess over, isn’t it?
Wow, nice income.
Hmmm, but you said you used Adwords? I personally think that adwords is a very inaccurate keyword research program. If you can find the right keywords that have high search count + low competition then you could create some goos income. Obbiously keyword research would be the hardest part, but defiantly worth it.
I reccommend everyone to use Micro Niche Finder or Market Samurai for keyword research its worth the money.
Trust me.
Congrats on your success.
I must be missing something here. How can Adwords be inaccurate? If you want the lowdown on Google’s data, isn’t it better to get it straight from the horses mouth? Surely every other keyword tool out there is simply pulling its data from Google’s tool anyway.
Sorry to be such a dummy. I have Samurai, and I love it. But I still like to use the Adwords tool and if it’s inaccurate, then all the other keyword tools must be too.
I would be surprised about how much money you made so fast, but i am not especially if you were using existing blogs and did the masterful keyword research that you are known for.
I can’t wait to hear how much money you continue to make month after month, because i am sure it will probably stay steady or increase. I love this blog.
Thank you for your free ebook as well, that thing is GOLD!
Inspiring post! I’m a relative newbie so I’m sorry if this is daft question, but when you said above that all of your keywords were worth more than $50 a month, what does that mean? I thought maybe it was the Estimated Avg. CPC from Google Adwords KW tool, but I haven’t able to find anything over $10. Thank you!
Your last point is so true. Continually improving is the key. I took one of my failing sites and turn it into a four figure generator. Sometimes your site just need to be revamped.
Did you do any extra backlinking on the blog posts, or did everythig happen just because the posts got published and indexed?
Hey im Emma.Thanks for explaining. Your tip is relative to what Nick suggests in his book. If you havent gotten the privilage to read his book yet here is a free site at http://www.nickaviles.com.
hey I am manish . It was really good article to explain how you can u improve your writing skills by using simple word as much as possible.