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Tips for writing a better article: Bum Marketing – Part 9

Amin — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 13:58:43 +0000

Keyword Selection

To increase your search engine ranking, be very selective in choosing keywords. It can make the difference between a site earning a few dollars a day and a site earning hundreds of dollars a day.

Keywords, perhaps ‘keyword phrases’ is a better term to use, are one of the, if not the, most important attributes you can use for ensuring that your business is successful on the Internet. Keyword phrases are what people use when they’re searching the web. You must have done searches yourself and every time you did the search engines went looking for matches, so they can give you a selection of sites that meet your needs.

Although plenty of people do a single word search, generally speaking, it’s a little harder to get good rankings for such simple terms, especially in a competitive niche. Even phrases like ‘credit card’ throw up 176,000,000 results so they’re hard to do well for.

That’s where the keyword phrases come in. ‘Credit card application’, for example, has only 3,480,000 results. Still a lot, but much lower than ‘credit card’. “Apply for credit card” has just over 1,000,000 results.

And as long as there are good numbers of people searching for the phrase, the longer phrases are very often much easier to get ranked for. There’s a 3 word phrase one of my sites ranks for and I get #1 in MSN and #5 in Google. Those 2 results bring me in steady traffic and steady revenue.

If your site uses such keywords it can be much easier to get near the top of the search engine results – especially if you know the right way to implement a link-building campaign.

When you’re writing articles you should think about a range of keyword phrases you want your sites to be ranked for. Using some of the keyword phrases in the article is a good start, but in your call to action, your resource box, be sure to use the main keyword phrase you want to rank for. Use it as the anchor text to your site. If you’re not sure what that means, here’s an example for this post:

Learn how to make a good keyword selection by visiting www.sublime-products.com/articles

In the example above I used keyword selection as the anchor text. Used in that way it tells the search engines that the website/page it links to is related to that phrase. A single link as I have here probably won’t make me appear very high in the search engines for that phrase, but if I undertook an article writing campaign using that phrase this post would rise up the ranks of the search engines. Any time somebody looked for keyword selection my post would be there.

When you are choosing your keywords it’s worth checking the top 10 results in each search engine to see what your competition is. No point trying to take on sites that already have thousands of links with that anchort text – it would be too hard to climb the search engines with that much competition.

After choosing the main keyword phrase you want to target you should also pick several variations. Try to create new articles based around the various keyword phrases, remembering each time to use the main keyword phrase that you’re writing about as your anchor text. That gives you a chance to appear in the search results for a number of keyword phrases, thus ensuring more traffic.

Of course you don’t have to confine yourself to using the keyword phrases just in articles for submission. You can use the same technique when writing blog posts, for example.

Easy Keyword Research

It’s time consuming to do the research on keywords and to find out where the competition is. I use a keyword suggestion tool released by Jon Leger to do my research. For ploughing through the numbers and giving you the data you need to outflank the competition, his keywords tool is fast and easy to use.

The rest of this series of bum article marketing posts is password protected. Subscribe to this blog now to receive the password to read the other parts.

Bum Marketing Part 3

Amin — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:50:02 +0000

The hardest part of bum marketing is keyword selection.

Why is it so hard?

Well, actually, some people have an instinct for it and find it easy, but for most of us it’s work. The traditional advice – and it’s good advice – is to search for a hungry marketplace first and then look for a product you can sell into that marketplace. If you have hungry buyers then promoting a product should make you more money.

Great. Except that’s hard to do for most people. That’s because the steps go something like this:

Think of a niche you’d like to be involved in
Think up a list of of keywords related to that niche
For each keyword, check how many times it gets searched
Check how much competition each keyword has by doing a Google search
Check the top 10 websites returned by Google for that keyword
Analyze the onpage SEO and linking strategies of those websites
Go back to 3 until you’ve finished all the keywords
Now check all the keywords related to your original list of keywords and start back at 3
If you have time, eat something, take a headache pill and continue
Discard any keywords/niches that have too much competition, not enough competition(!), not enough search volume, or has no hungry market wanting to buy

The list is bigger than that, but 10 items are enough to give you the idea!

So how can you avoid some of that work?

I recommend that you sign up to Clickbank and take some time looking through their marketplace. Decide what subjects you would like to write about. Then find a couple of great products with affiliate programs to promote in your resource box at the end of the article.

Clickbank will give you all kinds of information about how popular the product is. You don’t have to do all that exhausting traditional keyword research just to find a product to promote. You only need to do a fairly small amount of research.

Next, you spend a little time looking for keywords to use in your articles by using the free tools listed below.

This is not the exhausting analysis you have to do the traditional way. This is picking out between 5 and 10 keywords that relate directly to the product you’re going to promote. You already know the niche and the product, so it’s a lot easier and faster. And the really good products to promote often give you ready made keyword lists as a starting point.

Notice I said starting point. Everybody is going to get that keyword list so how much competition do you think you’ll have if you use it without doing any work? You’ll have tons of competition.

What you’re looking for is a list of keywords that have reasonable search volume, but not too much competition. Reasonable search volume can be as low as 30 searches a day. That’s still potentially 1,000 visitors a month for you. Multiply that by the 5 or 10 keywords you choose and you’ve got potentially 10,000 visitors a month. Even with a lousy ratio of buyers to visitors you’re likely to make some sales with that kind of volume.

The exact number you’ll need for ‘reasonable’ search volume will depend on what you’re trying to achieve, what you’re promoting and the niche you’re in. But as a general rule you will face much more competition for keywords with very high search volume. Everybody is after a slice of that pie.

Keyword Building Tools

Here is a list of resources for finding great keywords:

There is a fantastic free keyword suggestion tool at

http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/

It will give you estimated daily search counts in the top search engines, a link to the Google trends for the keyword, links to the competition results on the search engines. As the first place to start looking it’s a great resource. There’s so much information on the page that you might not even know where to start looking. Just click and experiment. You’ll easily pick up how it works.

Google Suggest – what can I say about this? It’s just very cool. As you start typing it will come up with a drop-down list of words that fit what you’ve typed so far. Type weig for example and you’ll get keywords relating to weight loss. Not only that, but you’ll get the number of search results for each keyword. That’s your competition figure right there!

Google Suggest

Top word is a free tool that analyzes a complete web page and gives you a count of the key words and keyword phrases. It is also great for analyzing your meta tag descriptions, keywords and title tags. This tool is great for checking your optimization so you can make changes to your page that need to be made.

It’s actually meant for checking your web pages so you can improve them. But there’s nothing stopping you from analysing your competition to get some ideas about what they’ve done!

Topword Tool

The other articles in this series are password protected and only for my subscribers. If you’d like to read the rest of this series just sign up – the form is over on the top right of your screen.

DISCLAIMER: All information is intended for your general knowledge only and is not a guarantee of any income whatsoever. Whether you learn how to make income by promoting with articles is completely up to you and the amount of effort you put into your business. We make no warranty, express or implied, regarding your individual

Protected: Bum Marketing Part 2

Amin — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:58:39 +0000