• View
• Edit
• History
• Print

Keyword Research That Pays

Which keywords you target can make or break your affiliate marketing campaign, whether you're using AdWords or not.

As a general rule, more competitive (which typically means more highly desired) keywords cost more to bid on for PPC advertising. Because they have more competition, they also can be harder to rank for in the search engines.

Your best strategy is to find keywords that get a healthy number of searches, but aren't so competitive that you'll get squeezed out. This strategy is known as focusing on the long tail.

You want your ads related to a given keyword to appear in the top five ads listed on the first page of Google search results, preferably in spot two or three. The best way to get there is find long tail keyword phrases that target a sub-niche market like a laser beam. You'll pay less for those clicks, and you'll face less competition.

Keyword research isn't hard. Start with http://inventory.overture.com (Yahoo's free keyword research tool, which is still available as I write this, contrary to rumors about it going away). Enter any keyword phrase you want and you'll see other related phrases, along with an approximate number of searches per month for each.

Here are a few quick rules of thumb:

• Find some niche phrases with three or more words that have search counts from 1,000 to 5,000.
• Google each one and see how many AdWords ads show up—you want as few as you can find, and if they completely fill the ad space on the right of the first two pages, move on to another target.
• Enter the term in double quotes ("") in Google and note the page count—anything under about 5,000 is good, the lower the better.

You also can use the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool to get more ideas.