Affiliate Marketing

One of the most important things you need to do before you begin to build a website is to conduct keyword research. Why is this so important? Because the best way to build a sustainable affiliate marketing business is to generate website traffic via the search engines and the only way you can do this effectively is to have a highly optimimized website that is based on solid keyword research.

Within your niche you are looking to find keywords that have a reasonably high search volume and low or moderate competition. There is a manual way of doing this and there are tools you can use to help both automate the process and to keep you on track.

Manual Keyword Research
Your aim is to find keywords around your niche that have low or moderate competition. There are three ‘footprint’ searches you can use to do this:

1. Search with quotation marks – You type in a keyword phrase (use Google to help give you ideas of phrases that have three to five words) and put quotation marks around it. Right before the search results it will show you how many exact matches there are for that phrase. That is, how many other websites are using that exact keyword phrase – if it is in the millions you probably want to stop right now and find alternative keyword phrases related to your niche.

2. Search with quotation marks AND the prefix Intitle:”Your keyword phrase” – This footprint search will let you know how many other websites have that exact keyword phrase AND have it in the title of the page.

3. Search with quotation marks AND the prefix Intitle:”Your keyword phrase” AND Inurl:”Your keyword phrase” – This footprint search will let you know how many other websites have that exact keyword phrase AND have it in the title of the page AND have it in the url of that page.

This stuff might look tedious but it is really, really important. When you find a keyword phrase using the third footprint search that has less than 1,000 exact matches then you are in with a genuine chance of getting ranked on the first page of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). If it’s less than 100 it will be relatively straightforward to get ranked on the first page of SERPs and if it’s less than 25 then it will be easy to get ranked on the first page of SERPs.

However, running alongside the level of competition, you also need to make sure that the search volumes for each of your keyword phrases are relatively large. There’s no point being ranked on the first page of SERPs for a keyword phrase that has just ten searches a month. And as you might imagine there tends to be a correlation between how competitive a keyword phrase is and how many searches there are for that keyword phrase. But you are looking for a balance and in reality, you are looking for keyword phrases that have over a thousand searches each month – Google’s keyword tool can give you a decent indication of how many searches there are each month.

Before you build your website you need to find a selection of keyword phrases that are low or moderate competition combined with decent monthly search volume. Each one of these keyword phrases should be a different page of your website and how many you need to find is up to you. We would suggest a good starting point is to have between 6 and 20 keyword phrases.

Automated Keyword Research
Doing this keyword research manually is possible (as described above) but it’s also pretty tedious and long winded. So you might like to think about buying yourself a tool that will do most of the hard work for you. We recommend Micro Niche Finder as the keyword research tool of choice for affiliate marketers. By entering just one keyword, it gives you up to 600 related keyword ideas. For each of these keyword ideas it gives you the number of exact matches, an estimate of the monthly search volumes and let’s you analyze the level of competition. It costs $97 but this is a one-off cost and includes lifetime updates. It is on version 5 right now so it is a tool that has been around for a while and keeps getting upgraded as the search engines become more and more sophisticated.

LSI Keywords
While you are doing your keyword research you should also make a note of the LSI keywords (these are simply the words that the search engines regard as related to your main keywords and can be found at the bottom of most search results pages). The LSI keywords should be used naturally within your content.