Article marketing Part 2 : Keyword Research

There is no doubt, keyword (KW) is very important in the internet marketing. Especially for article marketing. Right KW helps us getting good flow of organic web traffic. The good part, we don’t have to pay for the traffic.

Just for clarification, keywords are word or phrase that internet users use when searching for information. Some call keywords with a combination of 3 or more words as “long tail keywords”.

There are many ways of finding the keywords. None are perfect.  However the one we going to discuss today is widely used by internet marketers.

Here are the steps :

Step 1 : Brainstorming

First we need to have a niche.  Niche in its simple form is just a specific topic that we want to talk or write about. Something like golf or fishing.

Then we need to do a brainstorming. Find out all possible associated words that fit with our niche. You might want to use thesaurus for this part.

Ok now let’s visit freekeywords.wordtracker.com and enter our keyword.

Wordtracker will list out 100 keywords that related to our niche.

In the above example we are using “marriage” keyword. And here is the out come.

Step 2: Selecting Long Tail Keywords

In the second step, we need to select potential and relevant keywords.

pickup keywords that related to our niche.

Note that the number given by wordtracker indicate the number of searches for that particular words. Bigger number indicate a good keywords as more people are searching for that particular keywords. So our odd is better.

Now all we need to do is to go through the list and pick only keywords that related to our niche. Select 10-20 potential keywords and put them in a spreadsheet. For our purposes we are looking for keywords that have more than 10 searches per day.

If you don’t have Excel you might want to consider open office package.  Its free.

Now we are ready for the next step.

Step 3: Finding Competition

In the third step we want to find out competition for our keywords. We want to target for keywords with less competition. Less competition means the keywords are easier to target.

There is no special tools for this step.  What we need is the good old google.com.

Do search all of our keywords. Make sure we put them in quotation. This tells Google that we are looking for the whole phrase, not just a portion of it.

Once we hit the search button, Google will list out all site that contain the phrase. What we are interested is the number on the top-right hand side of the screen. I’ve marked with number “2” in the following snap shot. Record all finding in our spreadsheet.

Now we are ready for the final stage.

Step 4: Evaluation

Our final step is evaluation.  We want to find out keywords that are easy to be dominated.

In a simple term we are looking for keywords that are high in searh number but low in competition.  For this posting purposes, we only talk about these two factors.  Even though there are few other consideration that we need to think about.

For article marketing purposes, we are looking for the following characteristics:

• more than 10 times search daily
• less than 50,000 competition.

In our marriage example we have 4 winners.

• marriage compatibility test
• free marriage compatibility tests
• marriage records free
• 100 questions before marriage

That’s it. Nothing fancy. We are ready to rock.

Till next time.