Affordable Online Business Strategies
Posts tagged keyword research
Another Free Way To Get Ideas For Your Articles
Feb 13th
Coming up with content for your business can be a real pain in the neck. Some days it’s almost impossible to get started writing anything. Even if you decide to pay others to write your content, you should give your writers ideas of what they should be writing.
Keyword research is one of the most often recommended ways of getting ideas. If you’re writing any kind of “how to” articles, the best keywords to target are the ones that ask a question. You probably already know search using phrases that will get you ideas for what people are asking questions about:
How to
What is
Stop
Where can I
This will give you a lot of ideas of what questions are being asked right now. If you’re interested in the questions that are being searched for in a given niche, you’ll have to sift through the results to find the ones that are related.
I just found about a free tool from WordTracker that you can use that will give you up to 100 of the questions that searchers are asking based on a keyword. I entered “digital cameras” and came up with 100 results. Here are a few of them:
digital cameras how do they work
what are the top selling digital cameras
what are digital cameras used for
what type of memory is best for digital cameras
how do digital cameras work
This is a great time saver, because you’ll have a ton of ideas to write about. To get more information for any of the keyword phrases, enter it into a search engine, and visit the sites that come up to do your research and take notes for your article.
This free WordTracker Keyword Question tool also allows you to download the results to your computer. I’d go to the site and try it out right away. And remember to bookmark it so you can easily get to it, because it’s a tool you’ll be using a lot! Click here to get to the site…
Getting Relevant Keywords In Any Market
Aug 9th
Yesterday I was having trouble with my keyword research. I have just gotten my copy of Market Samurai and was doing some basic keyword research. But I kept getting error messages, and couldn’t get any search or competition numbers.
I spent over an hour going over the support videos, and still couldn’t get any numbers. So I went to my Nichebot X account, and did Google LSI keyword research on 7 different keywords.
I went back an hour later, and found out that the searches had failed. Thinking that there must be something wrong with Market Samurai and Nichebot X, I decided to do some digging.
I went to the Market Samurai forum, and to my surprise, I found out that I wasn’t the only one having problems. Apparently Google was doing maintenance and the site wasn’t returning any numbers.
Hard to believe that Google would ever be less than perfect! If you had any trouble yesterday, now you know why.
Speaking of keyword research, I want to share something about keywords that has made my life easier.
The problem I have with keywords in a new market is that I’m just guessing what terms people are searching for. I need seed keywords so I can start digging deeper into a market. But if the niche is new to me, I’m not sure what most people are searching on. So I have to give it my best guess.
There is a really useful feature on the Google search page that takes the guesswork out of it. Almost every time I enter a search term, at the bottom of the results are a list of clickable related links.
You can do two things with this list. You can copy the list and then go to a research tool and plug each keyword in. Or you can click on the link and see the related sites, along with more suggestions at the bottom of the page.
It’s better to do both. This way you can get a list of related keywords right from Google. And you can keep drilling down until there are no more suggestions.
This is a quick and easy way to get a relevant set of related keyword in any market you’re interested in. It’s information from the biggest search engine, and it’s free.
Market Research Comes Before Keyword Research
Apr 5th
We all know that keyword research is vital to a marketing campaign. One thing I have learned is that the first step is not to go compile a list of as many keywords as possible, target the ones with the highest search volume, and create articles, ads and content based on the results.
Yes, it’s important to do those things.
Here’s where you could run into problems. If you’re looking at markets you can enter, the usual way to do it is to go to a keyword research tool and start typing in words and phrases that you “think” are being used to search in your market.
It doesn’t really matter what you or I think that the market is searching for. What matters is what keywords searchers are actually using. And this is where I was missing the point.
The first step before doing keyword research is doing market research. In other words, finding out where your potential customers are hanging out. Finding out what forums they visit, the blogs they comment on, the products they are already buying.
Paying attention to what your market is buying, what questions they are asking, and what solutions they are after is key. From this information, you will have a list of seed keywords that you can plug into a search engine. Look at several of the web sites listed, and see what they’re selling, and subscribe to their newsletters.
I’ll use an example. Let’s say I want to target the bee keeper market. So I think for a few minutes and come up with a few keywords. The problem is that I don’t know anything about bee keeping, so I don’t have any real idea of what search terms my market is using.
If all I do is rely on my limited knowledge of the market and my guess about which keywords to target, I could be missing out on a lot of potential. If I do market research instead, I’ll find out what products are out there, and I’ll get an idea of what the market is looking for by going to a few forums.
Keyword research is important, but it’s frustrating when you sit at your computer and can’t come up with a list of keywords, when you don’t have many ideas of what terms to use to get started. That’s why a little quick exercise in market research can be a real asset. And market research doesn’t have to be boring, long, or tedious.
Go to Amazon.com and take a look at the best selling books and most popular magazines in your market. Do a search for forums by using your keyword followed by forum – bee keeper forum – for example. Pick a few keywords, plug them into a search engine, look at a few of the top sites.
Then you’ll have a list of keywords that your market is using. You’ll be doing keyword research on words and phrases that the market uses, and your results will be more targeted.
