trafficmansionAs a promising website owner, you are probably familiar with all the things you can do to make some cash online. The only thing that you need to figure out is where to invest and why.
At this phase, you’re probably reading about all the best marketing practices, including affiliate marketing, and considering them as legitimate tactics for earning some sweet income.
The idea of promoting someone else’s brand and products that relate to your audience and look appealing is a method that’s widely accepted by businesses that are primarily focused on generating traffic.
For example, if you run a dating site, it’s smart to partner up with a brand that has something to offer to your audience. Every time someone is encouraged to convert via your efforts, you’ll earn a commission.
There are dozens of big networks like TrafficMansion that provide a giant spectre of different opportunities from which to choose. All you have to do is register and find what you’re willing to promote.
The promotion part, however; is far more difficult than most people think.
Selecting the right brand with the right potential requires a lot of upfront thinking. You need to make sure that you’re not wasting your time, money, and energy on promoting something that people have no interest in buying. And once you finally select what you want to promote, you need to figure out how to effectively market it on your site and in search.
Today, we at TrafficMansion are going to expand on that. We are going to talk about the importance of keyword research in affiliate marketing and how to find lucrative keywords after selecting something to promote.
The Value Behind Doing Proper Keywords Research
Now that you have selected what you’re going to promote, the following step revolves around doing thorough keyword research and figuring out how to adequately promote these brands or services on your site and in search.
The benefits of doing frequent and exhausting keyword research are literally endless. Apart from understanding how to effectively describe the selected brands/services and promote them in organic and paid search, conducting frequent keyword research helps a lot with learning more about your targeted users.
You’ll learn how they think and behave, as well as what search terms they use when they think about certain topics and problems they deal with on a regular basis.
Keyword selection is an extremely important process for anyone that operates online. But despite all that, most people’s process still revolves around three basics steps:
- Think of a couple of keywords that their target audience might be using when looking for their products or business;
- Insert them in Google Keyword Planner;
- Pick the top ones based on a gut feeling and hope for the best.
Of course, this is usually a recipe for disaster.
Today, we are going to change that.
If you want to find the right keywords that will not only bring intelligent traffic to your site and pages, but also help you create conversions and sales, you first need to identify relevant niche topics in your industry. Once you do that, you can tap into fresh buyer keywords that your competitors still aren’t using.
Where Keyword Research Should Start
As I already wrote above, intelligent KW (keyword) research shouldn’t start in Google Keyword Planner or any other tool. It should start in your head.
Why? Because these tools are horrible with coming up with ideas for the initial phase of your research.
People and machines don’t really think alike. For example, what are the first words you think of when someone mentions soccer? For me, it’s Real Madrid, World Cup, Messi, Ronaldo, soccer jerseys, etc.
For a tool like Ahrefs (and any other), it’s quite different:
As you see from the screenshot above, none of my related words showed up when I entered “soccer” in the Ahrefs’ search bar.
There is a huge difference between linguistic associations and search intent.
That’s why it’s super important to be extremely specific when selecting which keywords to pursue.
You shouldn’t look at high search volumes as your north star when niching down your topics. Chasing the same keywords that everyone else is chasing is a dead end street and a complete waste of your resources. Your main goal here should be to find some keywords with solid amounts of traffic that are also highly relevant to the brands you’re promoting.
The only way you can do that is by writing down as many keywords as you can think of that you would personally use when searching for such destinations online, while also unlocking search intent behind these queries.
Write everything that you think your ideal customers would care about. Whenever I’m digging for keywords, I always start with super broad topics and then niche my way down. If you need help coming up with new ideas, you can use one of these tools:
http://soovle.com/
https://ubersuggest.io/
http://answerthepublic.com/
These three tools are specifically designed to help you come up with an amazing number of broad keyword ideas you can check for in Ahrefs or any other keyword tool.
Niche Down Your Results and Start Digging for Gold
Once you finish your list of possible keywords, copy-paste all of your entries in Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer.
If you’re targeting people in a specific location, be sure to select the right country in the search bar.
Click on the little magnifying glass or press enter and let the tool do its magic.
In just a couple of seconds, Ahrefs will finish calculating your results and provide you with three columns of keyword ideas.
Your next move is to go through these suggestions and find the most lucrative keywords that are also a great logical fit for your products.
Look at the KD and search volume to determine which keywords generate great traffic but are still fairly easy to rank. The KD score represents the competitiveness of certain keywords. If the score is below 30, you won’t have a lot of trouble ranking for that keyword.
That’s it. That is how you search for relevant keywords on the Web.
However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many different ways and places to look for keywords. If you want to take things further and look for more promising data, read the remaining segments of this article. I’m going to share a couple of more promising places to search for lucrative keywords.
Existing Website Keyword Ideas
Once you generate a big enough list of “phase 1” keywords and learn more about how your targeted audience actually thinks and uses the engine to find what they’re looking for online, it’s time to check for which KWs for which you already rank.
If you already have an active website, you should be ranking for a couple of hundred keywords in Google. Knowing what they are is a perfect place to start fine-tuning your KW research. Open up your Google Search Console account and look at the average rank position of all the keywords you rank for and the number of clicks and impressions they bring to your site. You can see all of this under the Search Analytics options.
Single out your best keywords, see how well they compare with your new ideas, and how you can optimize your new pages to rank well in search. This will surely give you an idea of which direction you should be going. A single page can rank for 100 closely related keywords. Therefore, it’s always better to focus on top-performing pages, figure out how they tick, and how you can get the most out of them.
Competitor Keyword Ideas
Once you do that, be sure to look at what your competitors are doing. Research the keywords they rank for and cherry-pick the best ones. There’s a real chance that your competitors have already done the heavy lifting for you. All you have to do is examine their efforts and figure out where you can beat them for the desired traffic.
In case you’re new to the game and you still don’t know who your competitors are, just enter your phase one keywords in Google and see who ranks for them on the first page.
Sometimes, even a single competitor can supply you with enough keyword ideas to keep you busy for months. The general goal here is to look at what other brands in your niche are already doing and how can you beat them in their own game.
The process is quite simple:
- Put your phase one keyword ideas in Google and see who ranks for them;
- Copy-paste their domain into Ahrefs and look at their keywords;
- Analyze the traffic and KD of their keywords and find the ones where you can easily beat them;
- Repeat the process over and over again.
Over to You
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope it helped you understand how to look for keyword ideas for your upcoming affiliate marketing efforts.
As you can see from everything written above, the number one goal of every keyword research strategy is to use the right tools and think like someone who’s shopping for the items that you’re planning to sell/promote online.
We at Traffic Mansion have been doing our keyword research like this for a while now. It has certainly made it a lot easier for us to find lucrative KW opportunities for all of our marketing efforts. If you liked what you’ve read above, feel free to test our system on your own!
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