Don’t Always Trust A Guru (and my newest site revealed)…
Recently an IM guru (who I consider a friend) came out with a series of videos on running a profitable campaign. Now, I am not saying who, and above all, I still respect and admire this person greatly, so I don’t want this to come across too negative because their intentions are in the right place.
Anyway, the first video was about keyword research. I was a bit dissapointed to find that the primary way they said to find good keywords to rank for was to do the quote search and the “intitle” search.
If you get under 50,000 results in quotes and under 10,000 results for intitle, it could be a good keyword is what was said.
And that was it.
So, as I was in the middle of creating my new site, I thought I would ditch my usual method of keyword research (found in this post and emphasizing looking at average page rank of the first 10 results) and give it a whirl.
These are the results I got…but first let me tell you about the new site I was building.
I got to thinking about how I could really add value. And I mean REALLY add value to peoples lives.
Well, I thought about it for a while and realized how silly it is for me to try and market all the things I market – double chin exercises, guitar courses, anxiety treatments, registry repair software, boil treatments, emetophobia and on and on.
First, I don’t know squat about most of this stuff, so first I have to spend time learning. And second, they don’t really get me all jazzed up to write about, so they get boring after a while. And finally, am I REALLY trying to add value or make a buck selling e-books and miracle potions?
So, as amazingly stupid and simple as this sounds, I came up with the idea of doing something in the profession my offline business is in – accounting. Not the most exciting, but I do it every day, I know it inside and out, and I truly get to help people solve problems. And most important of all – I KNOW exactly what their problems are (this is crucial).
So I came up with www.learnquickbooksforfree.com. I won’t go into the details of why this is a problem for business owners, but basically I recorded 14 videos on how to use Quickbooks. It’s about 7-8 hours of video training, all completely free. And I encourage people to email me with their questions.
I could not find free training like this anywhere online. So, it really, truly adds value to people.
And its a simple opt-in list where I can build a relationship with my subscribers. Check out this email I got from one subscriber about the site and the help I gave her:
Mat,
You are amazing. I have gone to many sites and forums seeking an answer for this reimbursement issue, and I always seem to get confused and not really get my question answered. You have explained my options below and I see it so clearly and it seems so simple.
I will be using option 1 which is easiest for me to do. You have saved me a lot of time and frustration. The greatest thing about this is that I feel confident and I am now very excited to continue to populate quickbooks with my information and see my final reports. I wish you could understand what it means to users like us to find someone like you who is so knowledgeable, but more than that, is the fact that you are willing to share this information and devote your time for no cost, in today’s world. You are truly amazing and different.
Happy 4th and I know that I will have another question soon.
Thanks again!
Is that awesome or what!! That makes you feel good and is truly adding value to peoples lives.
So, thats my new site, and it is a simple Wordpress template I found free. I paid $10 for the domain and spent time on the videos. I plan on getting subscribers, building the relationship, and presenting offers on any one of the 1,000’s of business affiliate products out there (for example, a Stamps.com CPA offer pays $50 if they sign up for a 4 week trial!).
Now back to my keyword research fiasco.
My first keyphrase I chose was “free quickbooks training online” and here are some stats:
1. Between 1,300-1,600 searches per month
2. 369,000 search results
3. 39,000 quote results
4. 157 intitle results with quotes
Should be a slam dunk, right?
Final data:
5. Average page rank – 3.6 (yikes!)
So, I did 1 video, submitted to about 15 video sites, like Youtube and Metacafe. I wrote one article and submitted to about 25 social sites and I have built maybe 40-50 backlinks to the site.
See if you can find me ANYWHERE in the regular search results. Good luck, I can’t be found on at least the 1st 5 pages. Do it in quotes and I’m number 1, but people don’t search in quotes.
But I have 22 subscribers so far – and they literally have ALL come from Youtube.
I know, I know, one keyword can’t determine whether or not looking just at quotes and intitle is the best or not. BUT, I’m telling you, you can’t always blindly trust a so called guru, and you have to know what works.
In the case of keyword research, look at average page rank – that will be the best indicator of if you will rank quickly and high or not (remember www.bamboopatioshades.com? It’s still ranked number 1 and I have done NOTHING to it!).
And there is something to TRULY adding value. For one, it makes you feel good, and two, you build trust MUCH, MUCH faster. Think about it in your campaigns – are you really adding value or just trying to make a quick buck?
Cool Trick To Find The Golden Nugget High-Volume Keywords
I am working on another video about getting your content ranked on the 1st page of Google and it will be some pretty cool, but often overlooked, stuff.
But I was thinking about this today – have you ever chosen your keywords, cranked out some content, and then gotten little, or no, traffic whatsoever – even if you are ranked on the 1st page? And the best part is that Google told you that this low competition keyword had like 5,000 searches a month or something?
It’s happened to me more than a few times! It’s frustrating at best, and all your hard work seems totally wasted. Bottom line is that the Google search counts numbers (as well as any other keyword research software results) are often totally wrong!
Well, here’s a cool trick I learned from someone (not all my idea, but I can’t remember where I heard it) a while back that can help you weed out the losers on the front end.
1. Sign up for a new Google Adwords account (if you already use PPC, get a different account for this because it will kill your CTR)
2. Create a campaign using the keywords you want to test
3. Set up an Adgroup for each keyword
4. Target your keywords only in [brackets] to get the exact matches, don’t worry about broad and phrase
5. Set your bid price high so you ensure you get on the 1st page
6. Write your ads completely different than what your target keyword is. You do this so no one clicks on your ads. For example, if your keyword is “learn bass guitar” your ad might be about “pink boa constrictor stretchpants” or something completely off the wall.
7. Point it to your website so the relevancy is high.
8. Check it in 24 hours to see how many impressions you got.
Doing this will give you a MUCH better idea of the actual search volume.
Now, a word of caution – be sure to check your account frequently to make sure people are not clicking your ads or you could get in trouble. Odds are that no one will since you made the ads unrelated to your keywords, but it will make you sleep better if you check.
And another thing – BE SURE TO TURN OFF THE CONTENT NETWORK, only focus on Google search.
Try it and see what results you get, you could save yourself a ton of frustration and time targeting the wrong keywords.
2 Secrets To Ensure Your Spot On The 1st Page of Google
There are 2 things I do every time to ensure my spot on the 1st page of Google. I don’t see many marketers doing this, which makes me understand why so many fail.
Related Blogs
Find The Cash Sucking Keywords That Will Bring You Loads Of Targeted Traffic! – PART 2
If you are just arriving here, this post is part of a series of posts where I show you, step-by-step, what I do to put together a profitable campaign. To start at the beginning, GO HERE.
OK, whew, that last post was a long one, and this one is kind of long too. But keyword research is soooo important to get right. It literally means the difference between making money or spending hours and hours making content that never gets looked at, which means all of your work will be wasted.
So, we have our spreadsheet with 10-20-30-however many keywords. If you find lots of good ones from the previous steps, great, use them. If you only have 5 or so though, go back and find more. Our goal here is to further narrow down our list to 5-10 keywords we will initially target.
I like to find 10 total, but then pick 5 to target. Once I saturate those 5, I evaluate and move on to the other 5, etc.
The first thing we need to do is fill in the columns we did in the previous steps with what we find out from Google. These steps explain how to do it for one keyword. Just go back through the steps for each keyword. Here’s what we do:
1. First do a search in Google with quotes around your search term. So, if I were searching for “jamorama review” I would type “jamorama review” into the search box with the quotes. Easy enough, huh? Make note of the total search results and enter that number in your “Quotes” column next to that keyword.
IMPORTANT**This is where most aspiring IM’ers make a major blunder – they are taught to only go after keywords with 5,000 or less results with a quote search. So, if they get more than 5,000 in this Step, they automatically discard the keyword as too competitive. Read on to Step 2 to see why they are WRONG…
2. Next, read THIS POST first on how Google lies to us. Hopefully after reading that post this makes sense, but basically you want to scroll all the way down to the bottom of page 1 of the search results from the search in Step 1.
At the bottom of the page, google lists out the results as 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. Click on the 10 to go to the 10th page of search results.
Do this over and over until you get to the last search result. You’ll be surprised to find that the last search result is much lower than what you found in Step 1.
Make note of the total search results after reaching the end and put this amount in the “Revised Quotes” column.
3. Next, we want to go back to the Google search box and type the keyphrase in as follows (using the Jamorama review example):
intitle:”jamorama review”
This will tell us how many pages have our keyphrase in the title.
BUT…
after you do this search, do what you did in Step 2 again (go to the very end of the search results). Record this result in the “Intitle” column.
4. This step is exactly the same as Step 3, except you want to type into the Search box the following:
intitle:”jamorama review” inanchor:”jamorama review”
Notice there is no space between the : and “, but there is a space between ” and inanchor. Again, this tells us how many pages are specifically optimizing for our keyphrase by putting it in the title and anchor text. Go to the end of the results and record what you find in the “Intitle/”Inanchor” column.
Now, let’s pause for a moment so I can explain something.
Ultimately, we should only be concerned with how strong the 1st 10 results are in Google when doing a normal search (ie without quotes or operators) because this is where we are trying to rank. So, are the above not important?
I have heard some say that Steps 1-4 don’t even matter because we should only be concerned with the first page results BUT, I like to look at both the results in Steps 1-4 and the Steps I outline next. This is because if I find that the 1st page results are weak competitors, but there are 300 pages optimized for my keyword, I may still have a tough time ranking. As a result, I like to look at a combination of the above Steps with the following Steps.
Ultimately, you have to do what you are comfortable with, this is simply
the way I do it and what has worked for me.
OK, on to Step 5:
5. In this Step, we are focusing ONLY on the 1st page results. So, first you want to do a search in Google for your keyword without quotes or operators – just a plain old Google search.
We are looking at the Page Rank of each of the results on the 1st page. If you are not familiar with Page Rank, it is basically how important, on a scale of 1-10, that Google thinks a website is. The higher the page rank, the more important in Googles eyes. You can read more about Page Rank HERE.
So, how do you determine each pages page rank? Well, in the previous post I mentioned SEObook.com. We want to go back there and download their SEOToolbar. You can find it at http://tools.seobook.com/
Once you download this, you will have a Page Rank bar in your toolbar. So, every time you go to a page, it will tell you automatically what the page rank for that page is.
So we want to go to each page in the top 10 results and write down what the page rank is for that site. When we get all of these, we add them up and divide by 10. This gives us the average page rank for our keyphrase.
ONE IMPORTANT THING**do not add into the results any results such as Ezinearticles, Goarticles, Articlesbase, Zimbio, Digg, or any other social type site. This is because their page rank could artificially inflate our average. AND, we can publish on these sites too. We are really looking for websites other than these types of sites.
So, if you look at the 1st page results and you have 8 “regular” old websites and 2 Ezinearticles, you would add up the page rank of the 8 sites and divide by 8 to get your average.
OK, almost done!!
6. In this last step, I simply scan the 1st page results we got in Step 5 for these social type sites. You can really do this step in conjunction with Step 5.
The reason for this is that if there are Ezinearticles or other sites like Digg on the 1st page results (WITHOUT quotes or operators), I know I have a really, really good shot at getting on the 1st page also because I can put content on these sites as well.
So, on my spreadsheet, I just make a notation that there are some of these social sites on page 1 and which sites they are.
You’ll go through these steps for each of your keywords. And by the way, there are software programs, like Micro Niche Finder, that will do the majority of these steps for you, but it’s nice to do it for free and I think it’s important to understand the steps involved.
How To Interpret What You Have
So, we have all these numbers in front of us and we need to pick the ones that we think we will have the best shot at ranking for. We want to start off by choosing 5 that we like.
IMPORTANT**I am going to give some guidelines below on what to look for, but the absolute most important thing to remember is that you have to not get frozen in choosing your keywords and determining which ones to target.
ALOT of people get frozen with fear at this point because they worry if they are doing it right or wrong…
DO NOT DO THIS, and don’t make it overly complicated. It’s not rocket science!
Pick what you think is best and get to work with your site and content (I’ll get into way more detail on this in a later post) because as you gain experience and confidence, you will start to know pretty quickly what you will be able to rank for and what you won’t be able to rank for. Just remember, keep moving forward.
OK, the guidelines I follow are as follows:
1. intitle/inanchor results below 20-25, the lower the better
2. Average page rank < 2-3
3. A social site on page 1 results
These are my “ultimate” guidelines, but I am flexible because I can’t always have my cake and eat it too. If you meet 1 & 2, but not 3, it’s probably fine. If you meet 2 & 3, but not 1, you’ll probably be OK.
I have ranked on page 1 for phrases with 200 intitle/inanchor and I have ranked when no social site is on page 1. These are simply guidelines. Again, choose what you think is best and move on to your site – you can’t sell anything if you don’t get some content up!
OK, this will keep you a little busy…my next post will be on getting our domain and setting up our site – and a cool tool I use that gets my affiliate sites up in literally minutes!
To your SUCCESS!
Find The Cash Sucking Keywords That Will Bring You Loads Of Targeted Traffic! – PART 1
Catchy title for my post, huh?
If you are just arriving here, this post is part of a series of posts where I show you, step-by-step, what I do to put together a profitable campaign. To start at the beginning, GO HERE.
This post is kind of long so bear with me!! I am breaking it down into 2 posts so you can digest it all.
OK, so we have decided on our niche, and now we have to find the keywords that are going to bring us traffic from the search engines. In other words, we want to rank for these keywords, on the first page of Google, to get natural, organic traffic.
And keep in mind that we will initially get traffic from articles for these keywords, but the whole goal is to get our pages ranked. Articles will most likely die off, so we want our real estate (our sites) to gain value and go up in the search engines.
Here is exactly how I do keyword research, and the reasons I do it this way:
1. First, I open a new Excel spreadsheet and I list out in column A all “buying” keywords. Buying keywords are the ones that I feel people would type in to the SE’s if they want to buy a product. They typically include 1) the product names I am promoting, and 2) combinations of the words “buy” “purchase” “review” and “reviews.”
So, for example, for one of the guitar products I will be promoting, Jamorama, I would type into my spreadsheet:
jamorama
buy jamorama
purchase jamorama
jamorama review
jamorama reviews
2. Next, I go to the affiliate sections of the vendors sites I plan on promoting. Most vendors will have a fairly good affiliate section full of banners, sample email templates, other graphics, and yes, keywords. Take these keywords with a grain of salt though because I have found that they are generally just generic keywords.
I take these keywords from each vendors site and I paste them into my Excel spreadsheet vertically in column A below my keywords in Step 1.
3. I then go to the Google external keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and I do a “Website content” search for EACH of the vendors websites.
I take every one of the keywords I get and paste them into column A of my spreadsheet.
4. I then go to SEObook at http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ (register for an account, it’s free, and a great keyword tool) and I type in my “root” keywords. The root keywords are my main important keywords.
I am focusing this campaign on learning the electric guitar since it is a little more focused than just “learn guitar,” so I type in “learn electric guitar” into SEObook’s keyword tool. I take these keyword results and paste them into my Excel spreadsheet like the other lists.
Don’t worry about search volume or anything like that yet.
5. I then go to Micro Niche Finder and do the same keyword search as I did in SEObook. If you are not familiar with Micro Niche Finder, it is a keyword tool that you have to pay for. In my opinion, it is well worth the money, but it is not necessary to do the keyword research I am talking about here.
As a side note – any tool you use in IM should be judged on 1) whether it saves you time or 2) it helps you accomplish your goal. Like any tool I use, Micro Niche Finder saves me a ton of time and gives me some great keyword ideas.
If you have the time, do it by hand and save your money. If you don’t have the time, get Micro Niche Finder or another keyword research tool to speed up the process.
I take the keywords I get from Micro Niche Finder and paste those into my spreadsheet.
So, now I have a really healthy list of keywords.
6. I then go back to the Google free keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal but this time I do a “descriptive words or phrases” search with my newly generated keyword list.
I simply take my list from Excel and paste all of them into the Google Keyword tool search box.
7. This filters out all of the duplicates and gives me a nice keyword list, with synonyms, to work with. I take this list and export it to a new Excel spreadsheet.
8. I then do a couple things. I create a couple column headers titled as follows (right next to the search volume column): 1) Quotes, 2) Revised Quotes, 3) Intitle 4) Intitle/Inanchor, 5) Average Page Rank, 6) Social Page 1.
Here’s what they mean -
- Quotes - this is the number of search results when I type in the keyword with quotes
- Revised quotes – this is going to the end of the search results found in number 1. For an explanation on this, read THIS POST.
- Intitle – this is the search results, in quotes, with typing in the “Intitle” operator. This tells me how many pages have my certain keyphrase in the title, in that order
- Intitle/Inanchor - this displays the search results, in quotes, with typing in the “intitle” and “inanchor” operators. This tells me how many search results there are for my search term in the title of a page and the anchor text of a page. This gives me an idea of how many pages are actually optimizing for my keyphrase. An example of what this would look like is as follows:
intitle:”jamorama review” inanchor:”jamorama review”
- Average Page Rank – this is the average page rank of the web pages in the top 10 (first page) search results on Google (searched without quotes or any operators). You can download a pagerank toolbar for free at SEObook.com (the same site with the keyword tool) to easily tell the pagerank of websites.
- Social Page 1 – this means when you do a non-quote and non-operator search in Google, are there any social sites, like Ezinearticles, Go articles, Articlesbase, Digg, weebly, etc. on Page 1 of the results. If there are, this is a great indication that you can get on Page 1 fairly easily. If you notice that most of the 1st page results are authority sites, like Amazon, Ebay, Wikipedia, etc., you’ll have a much harder time competing.
9. Now, I take my big list of keywords and I sort them according to search volume. I only pay attention to the Gloabl Search Volume and not the Local Search Volume. So, just delete the “competition” and “Local Search Volume” columns.
10. Next, I get rid of all keywords with less than 500 searches per month. You can adjust this as you see fit, but I have found some great, low competition keywords at 500 or so searches a month that have been goldmines. Some people go lower than 500, some go higher.
11. I then scan my list for any keywords that “look good.” What does this mean? To me it means they make sense and sound like someone who is looking to spend money. For example, if I am targeting people who want to learn the electric guitar online, “learn electric guitar online” is a slam dunk keyword for me to target. But, “learn acoustic guitar online” is not a good one. Make sense?
I highlight these for further research.
12. I also get rid of all the “junk” keywords or keywords that don’t make any sense. For example, one that showed up for my guitar keywords was “guitar learn online.” In my opinion, this is jibberish. It may show that it gets 10,000 searches per month, but it does not make sense that someone would type this into the SE’s. So, I just get rid of them.
13. I try to find 10-20 (or more, if possible) good keywords that fit my target market. Once I identify these, the real fun starts!
In my next post, I reveal how to look at each of these keywords we just found to narrow them down to which ones we think will make us a bunch of moolah and which ones don’t have a fighting chance.
Stick around, it’s awesome having you here!
The Anatomy of a Campaign-Why Did I Choose This Niche?
If you are just starting at this post, start at the first “Anatomy of a Campaign” post for it to make sense. OR, go to the “Anatomy of a Post” dedicated page to see all the posts in chronological order.
You’re probably wondering why I chose the “learn to play guitar” niche? It’s actually a pretty simple answer. But first I have to confess that I have been looking at this niche for a few months now.
I had heard it mentioned by others a few months back and I researched it briefly back then.
I found out that there is a ton of search volume for it. And I have a guitar myself (which I bought and never learned how to play!) which I bought lessons for.
But just think about it this way – playing the guitar is cool. You can play along with your favorite songs, be in a band, and just generally have fun doing it.
But it aint easy, I can tell you that from first hand experience. Any one that gets a guitar, and A LOT of people do, NEEDS some type of instruction. You can’t just pick up a guitar and start playing (at least anything that sounds good!).
The thought process is usually like this – someone hears their favorite song and thinks, “man, I would love to be able to play that on guitar. That would be so cool.” They then go buy a guitar with no idea how to play it. They quickly realize they need some sort of lessons to learn even the basics.
At this point they have a couple options – they can get private instruction, they can buy a DVD or book, or they can go online and start learning immediately.
Private instruction is expensive and a book is a horrible way to learn guitar, trust me. A DVD is helpful, but you generally have to go to the store and get it or order it online and wait for delivery.
My thinking (and my research bears this out) is that a lot of people will go online to find on-demand videos so they have immediate access from any computer.
I also wanted to choose a niche that was wide and deep with A LOT of keyword opportunities. I have tried ultra-targeted niches in the past and have not had a lot of success.
I have come to the conclusion that you have to go after the BIG niches with A LOT of traffic to make money.
And they have to be niches that have proven to make money – don’t reinvent the wheel, just go with what works.
However, this does not mean you have to go after keywords like “learn guitar.” If you do, you’ll get buried and never make any money, it’s just too competitive.
But, if you drill down and find that, say, “learn how to play acoustic guitar online” has some healthy search volume and is not that competitive, you have a good shot at making some serious cash.
So, in summary:
1. Go after broad and deep niches that are already proven money makers and have a lot of search volume
2. Drill down the niche to smaller sub niches with longer-tail keywords. In the learn guitar niche, for example, you can drill down and focus on acoustic guitar, electric guitar, blues guitar, worship guitar, beginners guitar, etc. And once you start doing some keyword research, you’ll see there are a number of fantastic long-tail keywords.
Next up – How I do keyword research to find the money getting keywords. Don’t miss it because it is not what you’d expect (AND you can duplicate it in your research too!).
Is Google screwing with you?
Gotta love Google, right?
When I started internet marketing a couple years ago, one of the first things I learned was to go after “low competition” keywords.
This meant to do a Google search of your keywords with the term in quotes. If I got under 5,000 results, use it. If not, move on to another search term.
Only problem was, I couldn’t find many. And any keyword I managed to find with under 5,000 results, didn’t make sense. There was no way people were searching for such odd ball terms.
Then I stumbled upon Google’s big lie…and my results started to change after I discovered it…
Want to know what it is?
Lean closer, so I can whisper it to you. I don’t want many people knowing about it…
The results they display are not actually the real search results.
What?!?
In my experience, they are drastically overstated.
How?
Try this little exercise and you will see what I mean:
Go to google right now and do a search for “get rid of tonsil stones” in quotes. When I do it, I get 1,350,000 results. So, if this is the case, I would automatically discard this term as too competitive.
Now, try this. Scroll to the bottom of those search results. Click on the “10″ for the 10th page of results. Keep clicking on the last number until it stops displaying results.
When you get to the end, how many does it show?
For me it’s 416 results!
Does this mean “get rid of tonsil stones” is a slam dunk keyword you will make money off of?
No, it doesn’t, because there are a few other important factors involved, BUT…
It does mean that instead of discarding this as a competitive keyword, you actually probably have a chance at ranking for it with some work. And this can open up a whole new world of opportunity for you.
Try it with your keywords and see what actual results you get, they may surprise you.
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Tools I Personally Use & Recommend
