Selecting Keywords, a new approach

[Dinghus]

Everyone wants to find the holy grail of a niche that pays like crazy. But so many follow along with the crowd. You find an affiliate product and use the recommended keywords and prewritten ads and wait for the money to roll in. Disappointed once again.

So then you run around trying to find your own keywords to use to find a niche. Niche marketing is the bomb! But the money still doesn't flow. Why not? Now you have narrowed your keywords too far and only get maybe 1 or 2 visitors a day if you are lucky.

What you need to do is find keywords that work but are not on the list of the "big boys". "Big boys" being defined as the ones whose PPC daily budget is more than your annual income. What if you could refine their keywords just a little bit but pay a whole lot less and get the traffic too? How do you find such keywords tho? The first thing to do is to find out what they are bidding on and how much it is costing them. A fantastic tool for this is PPC Spy. Use it with Firefox and do a search on a common keyword for your product and there are buttons under the ppc ads so you can see what the keywords are for that site. Easy! Now start brainstorming about the product. You know what they are bidding on so what are they NOT bidding on or bidding real low on?

Maybe they are bidding on "widgets, blue widgets, green widgets" etc. Now you can look at the product and bid on "small widgets, small blue widgets" etc. and underbid them but get about the same amount of traffic.

Think horizontal, not vertical. What do I mean by that? Vertical bidding is going for every keyword phrase you can think of that relates to your product with no real consistancy. Like you are bidding on "widgets, thingamabobs, whatchamacallits". On the other hand horizontal bidding is "blue widgets, green widgets, widgets with polka dots". Widgets (your keyword) is ALWAYS in the phrase. You can set up multiple ad groups that cover different keywords, but each one should stick with having the keyword in the phrase.

Once you've done that, watch it for a bit and see what phrases are doing the best. Get rid of the rest. And by best, I mean CONVERSIONS, not traffic. If I get 5 sales on 1000 hits for keyword I'm doing bad. If I get 1 sale on 10 clicks, I'm doing much better. Dump the poor performers quick.

Adjust your bids on high ranking keywords. If you are sitting in the #1 spot, adjust your bid DOWN. You want to be in the 3-8 range. #1 and #2 get a LOT of looky-loo clicks. Not serious buyers. Less than 8 and you are unlikely to be seen at all.

Use the tools that look at keywords NOT to find keywords to bid on, but to find keywords NOT to bid on. Then look for words "they" have missed.

Finally, don't forget misspellings!!!! I actually had better luck with a misspelling than with a correct spelling. Want to find misspellings? Type your keywords as fast as you can and see what comes up. Like the word "keywords". Most common misspelling? "kewyords".

Lesson learned? Find keywords that others aren't bidding on or that they are not bidding very high on and use them.

[regmac]

Yeah, that's the way a bidder should do it because it's really hopeless to target highly competitive keywords with high starting bid.. Keyword research is really a fundamental way to success with PPC and optimization.

Great post..

[DaveHoffmann]

I agree.
You have to think horizontally.
I have some keywords that I pay only $0.05 / click but make $0.25 back.
And still I see no competition at all.

Why? Because everyone is bidding on the same - obvious - keywords.
Nobody bothers to do a little research besides entering a keyword into a keyword tool.

I personally use Keyword Spy and Google Cash Detecive to find the profitable keywords my competitors use.
Then I don't just copy them but expand on these keywords.

One example: 3 days ago I was doing research with Google Cash Detective and found that the term 'tennis video lesson' was profitable for an affiliate for a tennis product on Clickbank.

What I did is not just copy their keyword and ads but expand on it:
--> tennis dvd lesson, tennis video coach, tennis coach DVD and so on.
This gave me a campaign that is now making $80 / day pure profit with just 30 minutes of work.

It doesn't always work but at least twice per week I find a small number of profitable keywords that way.

What really surprises me is that almost nobody is doing it. I cannot see any real competition for the keywords that are making me money.
Everybody seems to be lazy and just promote on obvious keywords like
'lose weight' or 'make money online'

With just a little research you find many profitable campaigns that will make you passive income for months - sometimes years.