Affiliate Marketing E-Course
Course Content
Lesson 1 - Introduction
Lesson 2 - Campaign Outline
Lesson 3 - Product And Keyword Selection
Lesson 4 - Building a Squidoo Lens With Relevance
Lesson 5 - Promoting Your Squidoo Lens
Lesson 6 - Article Marketing
Lesson 7 - Cashing In With Cheap Traffic
Lesson 8 - Blogging for Dollars
Lesson 9 - Mailing List Windfall
Q&A Video/mp3 #1
Q&A Video/mp3 #2
Lesson 3 - Product And Keyword Selection
Welcome back!
Today I want to cover the very important topic of product and keyword selection. This topic is the foundation for obtaining front page organic listings in Google which is what we're after. Right?
If you want to show up on the first page of Google for a keyword then your web content needs to be optimized for that keyword. This is essentially what search engine optimization (SEO) is all about. Although SEO is a very broad topic, the basics are enough to get you started and certainly enough to get the cash machine going.
The Live Course Campaign
To demonstrate how keyword selection works its magic for getting us the Google listings we want I'm going to go through the process with a real product and build a live campaign as we go through the course together. This example will be carried through the rest of the course so you can see how all this stuff ties together.
Now as much as I'd like this campaign to be a huge success I must admit right off that I have some doubts. Why? Because marketing is a competitive sport (for some it's a full contact sport)! It will be very difficult to pull off a successful campaign while at the same time telling a couple thousand people the product, keyword details and EXACT steps as we go along.
For the sake of the course I would appreciate very much if none of the members abuse the information here by stealing the campaign since it will serve us all better if the campaign isn't sabotaged. In other words, I really hope everyone follows along in their own campaign based on their OWN product selection. So please, do what I do, just do it with a different product.
Cool. Thanks. Now we can move on ;)
Marketing Warfare
In the last lesson I explained that the approach I took for my campaign was more of a warfare approach rather than the more conventional approach of first finding a hungry niche and then a product to solve their problem.
Instead, the approach I took was to find a product that is already selling well, but where I think I can still find an edge. Also, I'm targeting the late buying cycle where the prospect already knows the name of the product because they're in their research/decision phase. This means they're likely typing the product name or product specific words into Google. By targeting the later part of the buying cycle I can focus on a very narrow set of keywords that are product specific.
Basically I call it the warfare approach because I'm finding a product that sells well but has no clear marketing leader for the niche.
So let's go through this with our example campaign.
Step 1 - Find A Product
Product Selection
In my original campaign, which I'm modeling in this course, I choose a product from Clickbank.com. In the last lesson I gave some criteria for choosing a product. This criteria isn't set in stone and is intended to be a guideline. The point is that you simply want a product that sells well and has not too many refunds.
There are a lot of other affiliate networks and affiliate products to market other than through Clickbank so don't be shy. If you can't find what you're after at Clickbank look elsewhere. Just make sure it sells because this is a form of validation.
For the purpose of this example campaign I've selected a product called Keyword Elite. Keyword Elite, as you may have guessed, is a keyword analysis tool used to assist marketers in discovering profitable keywords for their niche. Since keywords are your path the money in niche markets it's actually a pretty valuable tool for marketers. Now most of the things this Keyword Elite can do you can do manually, if you have the time and you know what you're doing. This tool will literally save hours a week for the active marketer and even more for those who don't know how to do the work manually.
Here are the stats as of the time of writing (January 27, 2008) this
- Keyword Elite
- Clickbank Gravity: 125
- Clickbank %refd: 72%
- Clickbank $/Sale: $84.32 (actual amount after refunds)
- Clickbank Refund Rate: 9% (not shown by Clickbank)
Note the refund rate is not shown by Clickbank, but the Wealthy Affiliate site has a Clickbank refund calculator that can work it out for you. You can also get an idea of the refund rate by comparing the $/sale with the amount you are supposed to earn per sale.
For instance, if a product sells for $200 and you're supposed to get 75% ($150) but the $/sale shown on Clickbank is $100 then you know there are a lot of refunds because you're losing 33% of you commission to refunds.
Keyword Selection
There are a lot of products on Clickbank and elsewhere that have the right kind of numbers, but in order for use to get noticed in Google we need front page listings, preferably top 3. To do this we need a keyword that's likely to be used in a search but that doesn't return too many pages. Let's face it, it's tough to get front page listings if there are 10 million pages returned for the keyword.
If you're keywords return anything over 20 000 pages then you're probably not focusing on a niche and you're targeting too broad a group. Ideally I like to keep the pages returned for my keywords under 10 000. Smaller the better. If you can't find a viable keyword with low page count then you may need to find a new product.
Let's go through it with our Keyword Elite so you can see the process.
Since we're targeting late buying cycle consumers that already know the product we want our keyword to contain the product name since that's what they'll be searching with.
When I go to Google and search on Keyword Elite I find 667,000 pages returned for this keyword.
667,000 pages is far too many pages to compete with. But is this the real page count or are we being misled?
Here is a key concept that many beginners don't understand. When you do a search with a multi word keyword like Keyword Elite there are two ways to do it
- Without Quotes
Our example above was done without quotes around our keyword. This means Google will return all the pages with keyword and elite but not necessarily in that order or even together. For instance "the keyword of the day was surprise as an elite team of police stormed a gang house ..." This is NOT what we're really after. - With Quotes
If we instead do our search with quote around it "keyword elite" it will ensure Google only returns pages with the keywords together like this which is our real intention.
So if we search with quotes we get a smaller number of only 35,000 pages, as we would expect, because we've narrowed our focus to a smaller niche.
I can already hear your objection. Give me a break man! Who does a Google search with quotes around it? To be honest, not many people at all, and those that do are usually marketers that know what they're doing.
So how does this help? When you search Google with the unquoted keyword keyword elite Google returns 667,000 pages, but more importantly it places the 35,000 pages, where the two words appear together, at the top of all the 667,000 pages returned!
In other words, if we use keyword elite without quotes in a search we're only really competing with 35,000 pages, not 667,000 pages. So when doing research to determine if a keyword is viable and if you have a chance to compete with it you MUST use quotes around your keyword to determine what your real competition is.
So with this information in hand we see we have 35,000 pages to compete with for front page listings. That's still way to many. We need to get that number down to something more manageable. So let's see if we can narrow it down by making our key word more focused. This is precisely the idea behind the term "long tail". It's creating longer keywords to find smaller niches with less competition.
Let's try Keyword Elite Review ... with quotes we get
Wow, still 35,000 pages. A lot of people have written reviews on this product. If we can't find some decent keywords with fewer pages we might have to find a different product. The niche might be too competitive. But let's keep going a bit. There are a lot of keywords that can make a niche.
Let's try Keyword Elite Scam ...
Bingo! Only 400! That's more like it!
And notice how many AdWords ads there are along the side of the page? That tells me the keyword is profitable because all those people are paying for those ads! If there were only 1 or 2 ads I'd be wondering why. In fact, if you do the search yourself you'll see there are 3 pages of sponsored links that are being paid for! I think we found our product and keyword for our campaign.
Now if I hadn't been able to find a reasonable keyword with low competition I would have simply looked for a different product and repeated the process. If course there are many more keywords that might still be usable for this product, but we only need one to start a campaign.
What's Next?
With a product selected and a keyword in hand we're ready to start building our content. The first place I started for my campaign was Squidoo, as discussed in the overview in the previous lesson.
Since we're trying to build solid organic listings for our keyword we want to be sure we use the keyword properly so we don't waste our valuable golden nugget we just uncovered. This is where a little SEO comes in handy.
The important thing to know at this point is that we want our keyword to appear in all the important places, like the URL or our pages, in links from our articles, blog titles etc. When you look at our campaign diagram what we want is our keyword to "flow" through the whole diagram. This is the hugely important topic of relevance and you'll see how this works in the next lessons coming up.
For now, if you've got a product in mind and you've found a keyword that's not too competitive then be sure to include the keyword in your squidoo lens url and title.
BTW, I already grabbed "KeywordEliteScam" and "Keyword-Elite-Scam" at squidoo last night ;)
Next lesson we'll cover step 2 where I'll build a squidoo lens for the product and keyword and I'll point out the squidoo optimizations and various SEO techniques to make sure our lens gets noticed.
If you are a Wealthy Affiliate member be sure to check out the Keyword Research tutorial in the learning resource section for a deeper discussion of keyword research. And if you're wanting to get ahead of me a bit you might want to check out the tutorial titled Understanding Relevance, it's really very good.
Happy keyword hunting :),
Todd Ariss