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When it comes to writing articles for profit the one skill you MUST learn is choosing proper keywords.  If you don’t choose the right keywords you will make little if any money on the articles that you write.

We’re going to go through the process of choosing keywords using the tools you setup when you read my ‘Setting up your PC for article writing’ post.  Specifically the Wordtracker and Google Adwords keyword tools.  You’ll also need that little text file or notepad tool, but we’ll get to that later.

The process for choosing keywords is actually quite simple, a good, profitable keyword needs to fulfill three criteria to make you money.

1. They need to be popular so you get traffic
2. They need to pay well so you make money
3. They need to be unpopular so you’re competition is light

Huh?  1 and 3 contradict each other? Well, yes they do, and no they don’t as you will see

We’re going to go through the process of choosing a keyword for a new article.  First we’re going to find variations of the keyword, compare their payout and lastly guage the competition for page rank.  I’ll also show you how to use ‘long tail’ keywords, an advanced technique to get your article closer to the top of the search pages.

First off decide on what you want to write about, for this guide we’ll talk about mens electric shavers.  

Let’s talk about the psychology of the search because that’s how people find your article, by searching on google, yahoo or whatever.  Think about what go’s through a person’s head when they search.  In this case a person would probably type electric shaver, or possibly mens electric shaver, right?  Yep, that’s right, but they may also type in electric shavers or mens electric shavers.  This seems like a slight, inconsequential difference, but in fact these are two seperate keywords.  In this example here, we now have 4 potential keywords to work with.  Using the plural of a keyword is an easy way to target additional traffic with the same article without effort, just use the plural once or twice in your article.

Our first tool we’re going to use is Wordtracker.  Most people do not use this tool but I find it invaluable because it may clue you in to keywords or article ideas that you never thought of.

Go to the Wordtracker keyword tool and type in electric shaver, check out image 1.  Well what do you know, we completely forgot electric shaver REVIEWS, and it’s the top search when it comes to electric shavers.  Also, electric shavers is the more popular search.  Interesting that 24 people cared about who invented the electric shaver.. I want to point out here that mens electric shaver does not show up, don’t throw this keyword away though, It may still be a high payer.

Including keywords in your articles that get little searches isn’t bad if they are high paying keywords and they are relevant to the article topic, you’ll still get ads on your page related to that keyword.

For the time being we’ll concentrate on writing an article about electric shavers.  But you now have another article idea!, open up that text file or notepad program and type in electric shaver reviews, you can do this article later.  Don’t cheat yourself by not writing down this keyword, you may forget it in a few days and never write that article.  Recording good keywords while researching other keywords is a great way to overcome writers block.

Our next step is to go to Google Adwords and research our keyword there, we’ll do that in part two of this guide

Possibly Related Posts:

• A New Keyword Tool | Detecting Commercial Intention
• Google Search as a Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide
• Wordtracker Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide
• The Keyword Selection Guide – Part 3