The Cheap Bastid » Finding Keywords

A New Keyword Tool | Detecting Commercial Intention

admin — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:41:42 +0000

This is a new keyword tool for you to use. It comes from Microsoft Adcenter. Actually it’s not a new keyword tool, it’s been around for a while. It’s called the Commercial Intent Tool, you can find it here. It’s just another weapon in my arsenal of profit.

Basically, the way it works is you type in your intended keyword and the keyword tool will give you the ‘Commercial Intention’ of it.

In simpler terms, it’ll tell you if people who are searching for that keyword are looking to buy something, or, more importantly, likely to click an ad.

I find this keyword tool useful for when I’m trying to decide on which keyword to use as my traffic keyword in an article, I always choose the one with the highest commercial intent.

Here’s some examples of how it works. Lets say I write an article about barbecue. Should I use barbecue as my traffic driver? Lets see…

Ooowee, not many clickers with this keyword...

Hmm, .61, not good at all. Probably not many clicks with this keyword. Let’s plug ‘barbecue grill’ into the keyword tool…

Better, but still sucks..

A little better, but still not what I’m looking for. How about ‘cheap barbecue grill’

This is much better! I found my keyword!

Holy crap! .98, you really can’t get much better than this. This is the keyword I should use as my traffic driver. Certainly the people arriving at my article are looking to buy and that means more clicks and Amazon sales, and you know what that means… Mo’ Money!

Obviously you need to find a balance between traffic and intent. If a keyword with an intent of .80 gets 60k hits a day it’s probably better than one with a .90 intent that only gets 15k hits a day.

Use this keyword tool to decide on like traffic keywords, sometimes there is an amazing difference.

If you can get high traffic, high intent keywords you WILL get more clicks!

Let me know what you think of this keyword tool and if it makes a difference in your keyword choices and income.

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Google Search as a Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide

admin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 01:12:12 +0000

Google search is a keyword tool?? Well, no it isn’t a keyword tool but we’re going to use it like one. After All, it doesn’t make any sense to spend time looking for good keywords to write articles on if when your article gets published it ends up on page 566 of google search.

Here’s how to prevent that.

Open up Google search in Firefox (with the keyword plugin installed) If you don’t have it, read my post on setting up your PC for writing articles here.

When you find a promising keyword, based on traffic and/or CPC go to google search and search that exact keyword.

Open up the last result on page one and look at the bottom right of the Firefox window, it’ll list the PageRank and Alexa rating of the page.

Articles on eHow have an Alexa rating of 468, which is incredible. The page rank starts at ‘Unranked’ and goes up from there.

With that being said, if your article can beat that last result on page one in terms of Alexa rating, then you will probably end up on the coveted first page of results for that keyword. If not, see how far back you’ll end up.

I should also say that, with minimal effort you should at least be able to get your articles PageRank to 1 or even 2, so keep that in mind when you look at the results.

So, armed with this information you can determine if that ‘juicy’ looking keyword is really a good one at all. If necessary go back and look at other keywords using Wordtracker and the Adsense tool. It’ll only take a few minutes but it’ll really payoff when you find one you can rank well AND get paid well for.

We can beat this page!

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Google Adwords Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide

admin — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:05:40 +0000

Probably the most important keyword tool available is the Google Adwords Keyword tool This baby will show you just about everything you need, from search volume to advertiser competition and cost-per-click.

If you already read the Wordtracker quick guide then continue on with this guide, if not, go and read it as these two tools work together.

Once you have a keyword, or keyword phrase you’d like to use from Wordtracker, go to the Google Adwords Keyword tool and type it in. Answer the security question and click the ‘Get keyword ideas’ button.

Once the results come up, enable the CPC column buy clicking the drop down list where it says ‘Choose columns to display’. As you can see, there’s tons of information here. What we’re looking for is a keyword with good traffic, and one that pays well. Hopefully it’ll be the same keyword. Explore different keywords by sorting by highest CPC, as well as traffic. Try to avoid one word keywords as they are already taken by the ‘big boys’

Once again, use this in combination with the Wordtracker tool and Google search, which I’ll cover next. The idea here is to find a good, eHow title friendly, well paying keyword that we can easily get onto page one of Google search.

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Wordtracker Keyword Tool – A Quick Guide

admin — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 22:46:22 +0000

Get article ideas here

I thought it would be nice to give a bit more detailed explanation of how I use the keyword tools out there to make my articles SEO friendly.

First up is the free keyword tool from Wordtracker. It’s extremely easy to use, and like I said, it’s free.

Just go here and type in a word you’re thinking of using and it returns the top related searches.

I like to use this tool when I have a broad idea on a new article, for example, when I want to write something anti virus related, but I’m not sure of the exact subject.

Check out this screenshot to the left. I typed in anti virus and it returned some related searches, as we can see there are some real good ones here, and by good ones I mean eHow article title friendly.

At this point you could click on one of the results and get more detailed search information. This is sometimes a good thing to do if the original keyword is a bit too broad. Either way, if you see more than one result that interests you, write the other ones down so you can come back to them later.

Use this keyword tool for ideas. For the best results though you need to use this in combination with Google Adwords keyword tool and Google Search, as we’ll see next.

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The Keyword Selection Guide – Part 3

admin — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 04:56:26 +0000

This is the final part of this guide, but by no means the last time I’ll post about this. Selecting keywords is the foundation to success or failure at writing articles for money. Get the right keyword and the money starts flowing in, the wrong one, and you just wasted an hour of your time.

Now, before we continue with this last part I would suggest you go to my Setting up your PC for Article Writing, then download and install Firefox and the Pagerank plugin. We’ll be using them extensively here. The plugin is a great keyword research tool.

In our last part we were considering 4 keywords, braun electric shavers, electric shaver braun, electric shaver, electric shavers.

What we need to do now is assess the competition we’ll face if we use these keywords.

Remember, our goal is to get onto the first page of google, second page is ok too, but page 812,388 is unacceptable, even page 5 is pushing it..

So, open up Firefox and then go to google, type in your first keyword.

What you need to do is click on the last result on page one, then look at the bottom right of the Firefox browser, it’ll list the pagerank and alexa rating of the page.

This is what I have..

Click on the link and lets see what the ranking is..

You’ll have to mouse over the number to see, mine says Pagerank of 3/10 and Alexa of over 2.5 million.

eHow articles, when they are published have a pagerank of ‘Unranked’ and an Alexa rating of 468. This will go to 0 and 468 after a few days.

Google, the most important search engine will use a combination of mostly Pagerank and some Alexa rank, to determine what it lists, the other engines, yahoo for example will use the Alexa rank over Pagerank. You can confirm this by going to yahoo and doing the same search. My end of page one search lists target, with a pagerank of ‘Unranked’ but an Alexa rating of 274. The last result on page 2 has a rank of 1/10 and an Alexa of 1.5 million or so, we’ll land high up on page two with this keyword.

How can we use this info to our advantage you say?? Easy, with minimal article promotion it’s quite easy to get our article to a rank of 2/10, not enough for page one, our article, with this keyword will land on page 2-5, not bad. But can we do better? Check the other keywords..

Well, well.. “electric shaver braun” looks real good, in fact I bet we can land on page one with this one. The last entry on the first page was an amazon affiliate astore, we can easily knock him off and get on page one.

We need to make this our lead keyword for our article. Going back to google adwords, we see that this keyword has an average monthly volume of 40k, and pays a bit over $2. Not bad, not great. We need to hedge our bets…

If you remember part 1of this guide, my rule #1 and #3 contradicted each other. Here’s where I’ll explain that.

You see there are two schools of thought when it comes to making money online with articles:

Get tons of traffic and clicks, even if they pay just .05 cents each
Get little traffic and clicks, but they pay $5 each

We’re going to go both routes.

First off we’ll use electric shavers braun for the page 1 ranking and the traffic. Use it in your article title, once or twice in your intro paragraph, then a few more times in your steps or tips/warning section. Shoot for a total of 5 or so times

Go back to google adwords, type in electric shavers and enable the CPC column, then double click on that column to get the high paying keywords.

If you scroll down to “Additional keywords to consider” something should jump out at you.. “braun electric razers’, pays a bit more, but with less traffic. You’ll want to use this ‘payout’ keyword twice in your article, just to get ads to show up.

For the payout keyword there’s no reason to check the ranking of pages because we’re using the other keyword to get traffic.

So, to summarize.

Check the ranking of pages using your target keyword
Choose the highest traffic one where you can land on page 1-2
Choose another keyword based on payout
Use the traffic keyword in your title, and 4 more times
Use the payout one two times in your article, just to get ads

The topic I’ve used here doesn’t have much in the way of variation in keyword payouts, I chose this topic to make you really look at the numbers and to really use those keyword tools. Other topics will have wildly varying payouts and traffic and be easier to analyze.

Some keywords aren’t article friendly, they just sound wrong. If you’ve looked at articles on eHow (and elsewhere) you may have noticed bad English article titles. This is why that happens, to get the keyword credit in your article, you have to use it exactly the way google adwords lists it.

In my next post I’ll talk about how to sneak keywords into your article so people don’t notice them…

I’d appreciate any comments y’all have on this, especially suggestions.

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The Keyword Selection Guide – Part 2

admin — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 02:21:46 +0000

: Image 1

In part 1 we used the Wordtracker keyword tool to get more variations for our possible article topic, electric shavers. We decided on two candidates, electric shaver and electric shavers.

In this part we’ll use the google adwords keyword tool to further research these keywords, possibly find additional ones, and even come up with some future article topics all from this one useful tool.

First off, open up the adwords tool by clicking on the bookmark you saved earlier. Type in electric shaver, enter the catch phrase and hit the ‘Get Keyword Ideas’ button.

There’s lots of columns and numbers there that may be confusing at first. Let’s dissect them.
Keywords: These are possible keywords that you can use
Advertiser competition: This is how much competition an advertiser faces to get their ad to appear on a page. The more competition, the more the advertiser pays to get placement, and the more you’ll make
Average search volume: Month: This is the average search volume last month
Approx Average search volume: This is the average search volume per month over the last year. Seasonal topics will show a big difference between the month average and the year average.

Before we go further we need to add a column, the most important column in my opinion.

Go to that drop down list on the right labeled “Show/Hide Columns” and choose to display “Show Estimated Avg CPC”

Another column appears in the list, this column, Avg CPC is the average amount that keyword pays per click. This isn’t really an average though, use this column in conjunction to gauge how well it will pay, the more competition the better.

As you can see from the above image the two keywords we were considering, electric shaver and electric shavers aren’t the best paying keywords, they do get good traffic though.

I’m going to stop here for a second. If you are writing an article for Bukisa, where you get paid on views not ad clicks our two keywords would be a good choice. Just in case, click once on the average search volume column to see if any other keyword gets good traffic. Nope, those are the best with about 1/2 million people per month searching for those keywords.

Now for eHow, where we get paid by ad clicks we need to find keywords with a balance between good traffic and high pay. So click twice on the “Estimated Avg. CPC” column to sort by pay.

As you can see our original two keywords moved 1/2 way down the list as there are more profitable keywords above it.

This is the subjective part. Personally I shoot for the best paying keywords in the XX,000 traffic range, but sometimes I’ll take a lower traffic keyword if the pay is unbelievable. Oh, check out ‘car insurance’ and sort by CPC and you’ll know what I mean.

In this list two keywords pop out at me. Electric shaver braun and braun electric shavers. These are two good ones to use. I would also take our original two keywords as they can be easily worked into the article.

In this phrase, braun electric shavers , we have two keywords; braun electric shavers and electric shavers.

Now, here’s an important thing to remember.

Keywords with more than one word are sometimes called ‘long tail keywords’ and when you type them into the keyword area of your article you need to use the correct syntax.

For space separated keyword fields put a dash in between each word in a long tail keyword. For comma separated just put a space. So, in eHow we would list our four target keywords as:

braun-electric-shavers electric-shaver-braun electric-shaver electric-shavers

This is important because google now knows you’re targeting that specific phrase, and will show your article if somebody types “braun electric shavers” into the search engine.

Now some of you may say to yourself, these keywords pay just about the same, why the bother. Well, two reasons, by choosing a keyword to show with little variation is payout and syntax I can show you how we can combine two keywords in our title, like this…

How to Get a Great Price on a Braun Electric Shaver

See, two keywords: braun-electric-shaver and electric-shaver. Do this as often as you can for success on getting traffic and money!

When google looks for keywords it gives more weight to keywords in the title and in the first paragraph of the article, my title above has two keywords which i’ll specify in the keyword section.

The second reason for showing this keyword is we now need to look at our competition to see what we’re up against to get page ranking.

The next part will show how to research our competition to make a final decision on our keywords for our article.

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The Keyword Selection Guide – Part 1

admin — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 23:53:58 +0000

Image 1

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.

They need to be popular so you get traffic
They need to pay well so you make money
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

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