As I’ve mentioned before, one of the keys to earning cash online is to understand keyword marketing research. One thing that I’ve seen people who’re new to Internet marketing struggle with is keyword research. I’ve covered selecting buying keywords previously. What I want to show you today is an easy way to find a list of long tail keywords you can use to create niche blog posts or even create a whole site around.

In this example, we will be considering an Adsense niche although this type of keyword marketing research will work for other niches as well. My favorite way to begin a research session is to pick up the local Yellow Pages phone book. This gives me a big list of service professions and products to choose from. I flip through the phone book to get a little brainstorming session going.

At this point, I’m looking for a high level niche, not a long tail. For this example, I’m going to pick ‘financial planning’. This niche has a lot of possibilities in it, but, it’s a very high competition keyword. It would take years to begin to rank well for it in search results. Since we would like to see results sooner and we don’t want to pay for traffic via ‘pay per click’ we want to find long tail terms that will present us with less of a challenge. We will also want to make sure that the traffic level is good and that it’s a buying keyword term as well.

Now we’re ready to do our online keyword marketing research. We’ll begin by loading up Google’s Adwords tool in one browser tab and another tab for our research. In this case, since we’re targeting a financial niche, we’ll go to CNN Money. I recommend going to a known authority site, such as CNN, to do this research. You might also try the site that’s currently #1 in search results for the top level keyword although I’ve found this not to produce as good results.

Our next step is to find a good financial planning article like this one: The ins and outs of hiring a financial adviser. We want to select an article that’s on our topic and that has at least 300 words, preferably more.

Next, we copy the URL of the article and then go back over to the Google keywords tool tab. You’ll see an option button that says “Website content”. Select that button to reveal the website content area. In this area you’ll see a text area where you can enter a URL. Paste the CNN URL there and click on the ‘Get Keyword Ideas’ button.

Now, below, we’ll have a list of keywords. Go to the ‘Choose columns to display’ dropdown and select ‘Show All’ so that you will get all the numbers, including the important “Estimated Avg. CPC” and “Global Monthly Search Volume”. You can either view this keyword information online or download it and save it as a CSV (comma separated values) for Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheet or database program. I recommend downloading it so that you can keep a record of the search. I also usually edit out columns I don’t use. I’ve included an example of this spreadsheet in CSV format here for you to download and study: financial planning keywords.

What we’re looking for in this list of keywords are the ones that have relatively low, but not too low, traffic. This is usually in the range of 10,000 to 50,000 visitors a month. You can go lower or higher but this range tends to be the sweet spot. And, since we’re wanting to use Adsense in this example, we want good payout values. This generally means that we want a minimum of about $5 showing since, as publishers, we’ll usually only see about 1/10 to 1/4 of this value. To make money with Adsense we want at least $1 a click on average, more if we can get it.

In our example, we might go for something like “independent financial advisor”, “financial counseling” or “financial planning software”. Of course, we would want to research the competition for the selected term using a tool like SEO Elite. Yes, I’ve made the mistake of jumping into a long tail niche that already had very tough competition without researching enough. However, if you take the time to do a little keyword research and competition analysis you’ll find good long tails to use. And, if you’re using Adsense, with a little finesse you can get better paying ads showing up on your site as well.

I hope you found this method of keyword marketing research helpful to you.

Frank Carr May 4th, 2009 SEO

SEO
adsense, Adwords, keyword research, keywords, long tail keywords