Posts Tagged ‘Keyword Research’

How To Pick Your URLs For The Challenge

January 22nd, 2010  |  by Court  |  Published in Explanations, For Beginners  |  7 Comments

It seems like the most common question I’m getting so far with the new challenge is, “How do I pick the URLs to use for the challenge?” This is a good question because the people that have the best results are going to be the ones that pick the best URLs.

The most important aspect of choosing a good URL to use is making sure that it’s a URL that targets a keyword phrase that’s searched for in Google. The title of this post (How To Pick Your URLs For The Challenge) would ironically be worthless for this challenge. Think about it – no one will search for ‘how to pick your urls for the challenge’ in a million years so there’s no point in getting ranked for the phrase in Google.

Using a URL that targeted the keyword ‘bowling ball bags’ would be a lot smarter. Why? Because people actually search for ‘bowling ball bags’ in Google – 5400 times per month. This certainly isn’t the best keyword in the history of the universe but it’s much better than the alternative in this example.

What To Do To Get Started

The first step in getting started is to pick one URL from your portfolio that targets a keyword. This might be your home page or this might be a post page. Some of your have e-commerce sites so for you this might be a page that sells products. Any of these will do as long as they target a keyword.

Some of you may be new to making money online and for you, you may not have many URLs to work with. For you, you may need to do some keyword research, article writing, and publishing to even get started. This challenge will be extremely effective for you since it illustrates some of the important aspects of creating online profits.

Bloggers

Since many people who read TKA are bloggers, I want to address blogging specifically. This experiment/challenge can be extremely effective for bloggers but could also be a colossal waste of time. Bloggers traditionally have many, many URLs that don’t target specific keyword phrases. The post you’re currently reading is one such example. As a blogger you need to be especially careful to build your links to URLs that were created to target specific keywords. If you’re unfamiliar with this process I would highly recommend reading this post: How To Target A Keyword With A Post Page. The first step for you may be creating a keyword targeted post that you can then get some links for.

Keyword Research For The Challenge

Since many of you are quite new, I want to give some advice that pertains to keyword research. The TKA members know exactly how to pick the proper keywords – let me help you out a little in that arena.

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is your best friend when it comes to keyword research. You want to find keywords with decent search volume when the tool is set to exact match. <——- This is highly important. I would recommend finding keywords that have search volumes over about 3,000 and CPCs over $1. Once you have decent keywords you can target them with post pages.

You can also search for your keywords in Google, check the PageRank of the pages that rank up top if you want to get an idea of how strong your competition is.

Those who achieve the best results with this experiment will be those who choose the best keywords.

For Those Who Have Plenty Of Keyword Targeting URLs

Those of you who already have lots of keyword-rich content are ahead of the curve. I would make a list of all of the URLs you have that currently get little traffic. I would then choose keywords based on search volume and CPCs. Higher numbers in those two areas will provide you with more potential to make profits.

Another aspect that you can consider in this process is finding keywords that you already rank somewhere for. If you have a keyword that you rank on page 2 or page 3 for, this experiment will help you considerably.

The key here is to choose one URL each day, improve it, and then move on the next day to a new URL.

Make Money Online With 100 Blog Posts Update

August 3rd, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Keyword Research, SEO  |  32 Comments

For the last week, I have been working as much as possible on my new make money experiment. The point of this experiment is to create 100 targeted blog posts within a 30 day period while tracking my earnings.

The first step in the process was to plan out the posts. That actually took almost a full week in itself. After I had everything ready I started writing.

Results July 27 – August 2

So far I have been able to write 25 posts and they’ve been absolutely killing it. I didn’t in my wildest dreams think that they would produce $371.98:

As you can see, I’m monetizing with Google Adsense and am using two ad units on the posts. One of the ads is placed within the post and the other is placed under it.

Obviously anyone would be happy with these results. Assuming that I don’t improve over the next three weeks, this experiment will put an extra $1594.20 in my pocket.

Planning Is Everything

Honestly I couldn’t have done this without a lot of planning. You can’t just throw up any 25 posts and expect this to happen. Before I even started writing posts I found 100 keywords with two important characteristics:

  • They had the potential to make a lot of money.
  • They were somewhat easy to rank for.

In order to make good money with Google Adsense, you have to have a solid foundation of keyword research and SEO. If you can’t pick the right keywords, you’re not going to be able to make it work with Adsense. The days of throwing up content and making a lot of money are over. You have to be a lot more put together than you did in the past. Choosing the right keywords to go after is crucial.

You can use the Adwords keyword tool to check both search volume and CPC and with these numbers, the higher the better. I use a formula to calculate exactly how much I think I can produce with a keyword in a month and these 25 keywords are worth $7366.47 per month. I honestly didn’t think that they would start producing this quickly but if you consider the potential of the keywords, it isn’t too, too crazy.

We talk about using this formula in our members area to decide which keywords will be worthwhile.

The Next Week

During the next week, I’m going to try to finish at least 25 more posts. The strategy is obviously working and I don’t see any reason to change it. I’m secretly hoping that I’ll be able to finish more like 35 posts but we’ll see how much time I have. Life is pretty busy right now!

Note to TKA members – watch for an update in the forums within the next two hours.

Choosing A Topic For A Website Part 2 – Analyzing Competition

January 22nd, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Keyword Research  |  35 Comments

When you first start looking at potential topics, like we did in the first part of Choosing A Topic For A Website, you are brainstorming and figuring out which topics will actually pay off. That’s the fun part – I honestly love coming up with new ideas and figuring out whether they can make money or not.

Money in a spread sheet is fun and all, but… what good does it do to pick a fancy smancy keyword if you can’t ever get into a position in Google and other search engines where you can get some traffic? I’ve found keywords before that have over 10,000,000 searches per month with super high CPCs. Unfortunately they’re useless because it would take a team of 150 of people to develop a top ranking for them.

Making sure that the competition isn’t too fierce is one of our biggest priorities when we choose a topic for a site. If I’m not 90% sure that I can rank for a keyword, I’m not going to waste my time.

For those of you that are starting out, you need to be especially careful to not choose keywords that are too difficult. I would start with simple niches, get some wins, and then move forward to slightly more difficult niches. Don’t try to play in the majors when you’ve never tried to play tee-ball.

Competitive Analysis

Here are the nuts and bolts of what I’m actually talking about. Step 1 is to do a search in Google for your keyword. Let’s analyze the keyword ‘cell phones’ just to see what we get. Here are the sites that come up on the first page:

What we need to do here is analyze how strong these pages are and make a decision about whether we can compete or not. A solid way to do this is by taking a look at Google’s own method for determining the relative strength of pages – PageRank.

PageRank is a scale (0-10) that can show us how good Google thinks each page online is. If a page is PageRank 10, Google is saying it’s one of the best and strongest pages online. On the other hand, if a page is PageRank 0, we know that Google thinks it’s a weak page.

You can find the PageRank of any page by installing the Google Toolbar for your internet browser and turning on the PageRank feature. The PageRank of each page you visit will then be displayed on the toolbar. You will see a little green bar at the top of your browser and if you hover over that bar it will tell you the PageRank of the page you’re looking at.

A way to short cut this process is to install the SEO For Firefox browser extension. This will help you to look up PageRank directly in Google’s results. If I do the same search with SEO For Firefox turned on, the results will look like this:

All of this extra jazz under each listing is being put there by SEO For Firefox. If we want to see the PR (PageRank) of each page, we click each of the little question marks by the PR under each listing. It will then look like this:

The little 7 next to the ‘PR:’ under the T-Mobile listing means that this particular page is a PR7 page. It would take a very serious campaign to compete with that page. The other pages in the top 4 are PR6, PR5, PR5, and PR4. That’s a boat-load of strength and I would recommend running for the hills. You don’t want to compete for keywords like this until after you have this whole process down.

PR5 pages are incredibly strong pages. PR4 pages are also pretty strong pages. We don’t even want to talk about PR6+.

If you’re starting out, you want to try to find keywords with competition that’s under PR3. I would prefer to see most of you find keywords that are even easier than that. If all you ever did was find keywords with <PR2 competition (they would of course have to have decent potential), you would be doing yourself a huge favor. You can beat PR3s and PR4s but it’s going to take a lot more work – sometimes too much work.

Guys I know that this is a floating scale and each of you has a different level of experience. Some of you have this down and will be able to take on PR4 pages. Others won’t be able to. All of you should start out choosing keywords that are fairly easy and move up the scale after you get some wins. I’m beating out quite a few PR7 pages now but that doesn’t mean it would have been a good idea 4 years ago. I would have lost my mind and would have probably quit.

If you really want to take this process to the next level you can read this lesson: How Many Links Does It Take To Get Ranked #1 In Google? I don’t feel like it’s necessary all of the time, but some of you will get some value out of it. The lesson today can teach you how to choose winners almost all of the time if you’ll just follow the concepts.

What you need to do now is go through the keywords in your spread sheet so you can analyze their competition. If I think I can rank for a keyword, I usually mark it green on my spread sheet. If I can’t rank for a keyword I mark it red. Do it and then you’ll know exactly which keywords to use.

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