Guide to Keyword Research

I decided I had to dedicate a whole post to keyword research, and why it's the most important thing you can do for yourself. This is something I wish I had known when I began starting blogs and using adsense, so don't take this advice lightly.

Things that are obvious when you begin making money online: (at least they were to me)

• You want a keyword that gets a lot of traffic. This is self explanatory. The more people who search for your keyword, the more traffic you will ultimately get and the more adsense clicks you will get. If your keyword only gets 1000 searches a month, first of all you'll only get a fraction of that traffic, and only a fraction of the traffic you get will click on ads. Use the google keyword tool to find out how much traffic a keyword gets.
  
• You want a keyword that has minimum competition. If you know anything about making money with niche sites and adsense, you should already know this. It's not hard to figure out how much competition there is out there. There are two things I do to determine competition. First I google search my keyword and I look at how many results come up. Second I check the first 4 results on the google SERPs and check their PR. I want all of the pages to have a PR of 3 and lower. If over 2 of them have a PR4 or higher, I scratch the keyword and go back to my drawing board.

So to sum this up so far, we want a healthy ratio of traffic to competition. Traffic>competition=healthy.

Things you might not know about keyword research: (things I didn't know but wish I had)

• Keyword CPC. When I started out, I didn't know that google had different CPC for different keywords. There is a huge range out there - from $0.05 to $50. You usually make half of the CPC at most. My first successful blog that I started was about six months ago now, and when I started it I didn't know about CPC or how to find it out. I chose a keyword that gets a lot of traffic, and is fairly competitive but has a lot of long tail keywords that fall into the same niche that get good traffic, as well. I worked hard on getting my site up in the SERPS and was pretty successful at doing so. I get good traffic and am fairly pleased with how I've done. I average between 15-25 Adsense clicks a day. You might be thinking that that's great considering I only put in about three real months of work into it, spent in total under $100 on it, and I didn't really know what I was doing. The problem: my keyword has an extremely low CPC. The highest CPC for a keyword that falls into my niche is under $2.00. The average is probably around $0.50. For the 15-25 clicks I get a day, I make an average of $3.50. That's about $100 a month. Sure, it'll keep growing and doing better, and I'm not complaining. I learned a lot from this blog and will keep pushing it with more and better keywords now that I know how to do keyword research properly. But I can't help thinking, if I had known before what I know now I wouldn't have chosen this niche. If I was even making $1 per click, (which is still on the low side) I would have a very successful little blog.
  
• If you rank for one keyword, it will be easier to rank for the others in the SERPs. Once you are on top of the SERPs for a keyword, the google bot will crawl your page more often and give more juice to your entire site. This makes it easier to get new pages indexed right away (for my most successful blog my new pages are usually indexed within the hour that I publish them). It will give new keywords more juice.

So now that I've told you the main things I'm looking for in a keyword, I should probably tell you how I go about doing this.
The google keyword tool is key. Become familiar with it, it's your best friend, your brother from another mother, your lover...you get the point. Basically what you want to do is as follows. Go to the google keyword tool. Type in your keyword, make sure "use synonyms" is checked and click "get keyword ideas". Now a chart will appear. The important columns are keywords, estimated average CPC, and global monthly search volume. If you don't see estimated average CPC, don't worry, this is expected. Go to the "choose columns to display" and click on the drop down menu and click on "show estimate average CPC". Now you should see it. While your at the drop down menu, why don't you hide the advertiser competition as well as the local monthly search volume. Now you want to go to "match type" drop down menu that will be on your right next to the "global monthly search volume". It will be on "broad" change it to "exact". This will give you the stats for people searching for the exact keywords and it's more accurate. This should set you up well to start doing keyword research. For a more detailed approach, checkout the keyword academy. It will cost you $1 for your first month and the information you will get is worth well over what you are going to pay.

Good luck with your keyword research and come back soon for more making money online for beginners!

Adsense and Internet: Mid July Report

For now I'll be reporting on how this whole adsense thing is going for me twice a month. Sometimes it gets slow, sometimes not so much, but I figure that saving it for twice a month will give me a lot of information to in turn give to you.

Let's just take a moment to remember my goals from June. If I recall correctly, I wanted 500 unique visitors a day and between $25 to $30 a month from my adsense earnings. I also wanted to create two new sites.

Now let's review where I am on this lovely summer day of July 20th.

Goal 1: To get 500 unique visitors a day.
Results so far: So far I haven't reached this goal. I've peaked at 633 in a day and my lowest has been 336. I'd say my average on a day is probably 410 (that's what I get most days). If I average all the days so far in July I have an average of 447 for the first 19 days of July. This isn't terrible but it isn't great either and I was hoping on averaging 500 by this time. Weekend are when I see the amount go lower (into the 300s) and weekdays are when I see it level out around 410 give or take. Let's hope for the best in the remaining days of the month.

Goal 2: To make at least between $25-$30 in the month.
Results so far: I've exceeded my adsense expectations already and expect to double what I've expected from adsense earnings this month. So far I have made $43 and expect between $50 and $60 by the end of the month. While this isn't a lot of extra money each month, a full year of making this much off of adsense will pay my rent for a month. I'll take it! Not to mention that if I continue to double this every month (which won't be easy but it's my goal) I'll be making bank in no time. On a daily basis I average anywhere between $0.50 and $3.50 a day. By keeping track of my adsense earnings on adsense and google analytics I've been able to see which pages on my sites have ads with a higher CPC. This is helpful because I now know which pages I should be targeting. For example, I have one keyword that I've been targeting since May. This keyword is pretty competitive, recieves a mediocre amount of traffic, but has a very low CPC. I manage to rank number 4 on google search for this keyword now (I peaked at 3) but I make on average $0.10 from a click. Some days I get 15 clicks, and imagine if I had done proper keyword research from the begining. I could be making a lot more than I am. I guess that's why it's called "learning" before "succeeding". But mind you, I can't stress this enough: KEYWORD RESEARCH IS SO IMPORTANT. When I started I didn't know about CPC, I only new about keyword competition, traffic, and SEO. It's really too bad but too late to change it. It is what it is.

Goal 3: Make two new sites.
Results so far: I've made two new sites, yes. One of them is a site that gets little traffic through most of the year but at one point in the year it is consistently one of the top 100 google search terms searched for a few days. This means I won't get much action except for a few days where I'll get a ton of action. It's not very competitive so I'm ranking pretty well on google for it considering it's a baby blog. I've made a second site which I've put on hold for now and I'll tell you why. Hubpages. Hubpages basically a site that allows you to post articles and create "hubs" which are like mini sites. You can put google adsense on and a number of affiliates, and you get 60% of the impressions that are made. You may wonder why you would want only 60% of the impressions when you can start your own site and make 100%. Well, with hubpages you'll get a lot more traffic with a lot less work than it's possible to get starting up a new site. I've been concentrating on hubpages and while I'm not exactly overflowing with cash, I've been making a few cents each day. I think the more I put into it the more I will see coming back. If I do good keyword research and use good SEO I could be making real money from it, as a lot of people are. We'll see how that goes. I want to make at least anoth 20 hubs by the end of the month. Seriously check out hubpages, it's easy to use and doesn't take too much time.

I'll be with you again to discuss how July turned out and my goals for August. I hope you're all doing well and making boat loads of cash! Be patient with google adsense and starting off in making money online. It's a real job but the work you put in turns into gold and I've already seen that happening.