Good luck selling a product that has no demand. Heck, good luck selling a product that does have demand, if you’re offering it to the wrong market.

As I said in my previous post Keywords are King, if you want to be successful online it’s of vital importance that you know and master three simple rules of marketing:

1. What are people looking for?
2. How are they looking for it?
3. How many other people know these two things?

Kind of a spin on the typical “what-where-how” triangle, but I believe this describes the necessity of obtaining viable, high-quality  keywords in the clearest way possible.

Keywords Turn “Online Money” into “Easy Online Money”

I covered all this in my Keywords are King article, but I’ll go ahead and touch on it briefly again.

People perform millions of searches on Google, Yahoo and MSN on a daily basis. Many of them are either A) looking for a specific product or service, or B) looking for a product or service to fufill a particular need that they have. In large part, making easy money online (or anywhere else) is intrinsic upon selling somebody a product, either directly or indirectly.

One of the most effective ways to promote a product is by building a website that offers the user information about it — reviews, specifications, pictures — whatever.

The theory is that people will perform a search in the search engine, come upon your website and go on to purchase a product that you refer, thereby earning you your commission.

There are numerous massive, well-established markets that have existed on the Internet for years: books, technology, weight loss, and so on. This gives you a lot to choose from in terms of what to promote, but it also gives you lots of competition. If you were to build a website to market a weight loss product, it would figuratively be consumed by the millions of other websites about weight loss. There’s only one way to ensure people find your site, and therefore ensure that you make money, and that is to target your keywords.

The rest of my article explains what keyword targeting is and the three steps to successful keyword selection.

What Are People Looking For?

What products is there actually a demand for? People buy millions and millions of things online, but targeting something broad like “books” or “ipods” isn’t going to get you anywhere. The best strategy is to look for long tail keywords, which are phrases of three or more words. This gives you a smaller, more focused audience that is looking for something specific, and also less advertising competition to deal with. For example: lots of people are searching for “ipods”, but significantly fewer people are searching for “refurbished orange ipod nanos,” and even less people are marketing them.

The trick here is to find what people are selling, and then check if anyone’s actually looking for it. With niche markets, there’s a high possibility that buyers aren’t being effectively united with sellers, and this is where your make your easy online money.

There’s a lot of good ways  to go about brainstorming a profitable niche market, and even more blogs that will tell you all about that, so I’m only going to list a couple that I use personally and find to work well.

Trends

Trend websites are a good place to start. Things like Google Trends, eBay Pulse and Yahoo Buzz all give you up-to-date information on the most popular searches.

Autocomplete

If you start typing something into the Google && Yahoo search fields, they will automatically make suggestions for keywords that match what you’ve entered. These suggestions are generally based on the most highly searched phrases, and can be great for expanding on your findings in the trends.

What’s Actually Selling

eBay and Amazon are good places to start. If you do a search and look at the auctions that are ending soon, you can get an idea of how well a particular market is selling. 1 bid, 12 bids, 0 bids? All very telling.

As I write this, “ipod” (heh! ) is actually listed on eBay Pulse as one of the top searches, so I want to reiterate that these are tools to help you brainstorm. They provide a starting point for you to go on, but it’s still going to take some thought to come up with the more specific variations to base your keywords on.

Where Are People Looking?

The short answer to that question is, of course, the search engines. How else do you find anything online? (Rhetorical question, please hold all comments.) Here’s what I really mean by “Where are people looking?” If you’ve got someone who’s interested in buying a refurbished orange ipod nano, then they’ll probably go to Google or Yahoo and type in “refurbished orange ipod nano” or some variation thereof. This goes for just about any product people want to buy — they’ll enter the search terms that they believe to be the best suited to finding what they’re seeking, and it’s your job to figure out what those terms are. (That’s the game in a nutshell right there.)

Now, this may seem to be pretty simple stupid at first glance, but there is a definite art form involved in distinguishing the valuable keywords from the worthless ones. I’ll give you a very basic example of what I’m talking about. Here are the results when I run the search term “reiki brand” through a keyword tool:

Basically, what this means is no one’s searching for this term, no one’s advertising for it, and no one cares about it. Now here’s the result on the term “reiki” by itself:

The point I’m making is that as little as one word can make a huge difference. This example is fairly crappy, because I can’t think of any scenario where you might want to target an audience searching for a reiki brand. If you were to, however, without any knowledge of the search demand for this keyword (ie. none) then any marketing you did would probably be competing with the entire “reiki” keyword. You wouldn’t have a chance.

To break down what we’ve covered so far: First, we discussed several ways to determine what the demand is for certain products. In particular, we want to focus on very particular subcategories of a larger market. What we are essentially doing now is researching the various words and phrases people enter into search engines to find these products (which many of them are intending to purchase) and to perhaps narrow our niche down even more.

One of the first tools I discovered to do this was Google’s Keyword Tool External and it’s still one of my favorite free tools to date. It allows you to enter one or more search terms, ie. “money,” “online money,” or “easy online money,” and outputs a list of all the search queries containing those words, plus an additional list of related queries.

You can see in the screenshot (click the image to the right) that I used the “Show/Hide Columns” drop down menu to display the “Estimated Average CPC” and the “Global Monthly Search Volume” columns and hide all the rest. This tells me A) The approximate monetary value of the keyword, and B) How many people are searching for it. For now, all we want to know is that the keyword is getting a decent amount of searches per month, say 10,000 and up.

** As an added note, if you’re logged into your Adwords account, you don’t have to fill out the Captcha to use this tool, and your sessions won’t time out. Google also remembers your column selections so you don’t have to keep resetting them each time you use it. Unfortunately, my SEO for Opera plugin won’t work properly when I’m logged in to Google, so I have to jump through the hoops every time. >:(

If you do a search for “free keyword tools” or something similar, you’ll come up with quite a few useful results. Some people might use one more than the other — everyone has their own preference. Here are a couple other free ones I use in addition to the Google keyword tool; these should be more than enough to get you started:

• Wordtracker
• SEOBook
• Compete

It’s not really important which tool you use, because a tool is only a tool — it can only perform as well as the person using it. To start with, enter keyword ideas you got from the trend websites or general brainstorming and make note of the results (in Notepad, Word, whatever you like. I personally use Excel.) From there, you’ll need to get creative.

Think of the things people buy, and things related to those things, or variations of them; a popular technique is to look for common misspellings. The keyword tools themselves will also help you out by supplying related search queries.  Repeat your search with anything you come up with, and again take note of the results.

What + Where, So How Many Other People Know About It?

If the other two sections are important, then this one is the absolute kicker. I talked briefly about how targeting a huge keyword like “weight loss” or “ipod” is pointless — this is because there’s so many other sites out there competing for it, and many of them have several years head start on you.

This niche website game has two parts: keywords are the first part, yes, but even if you’re targeting the right ones you still have to promote or you’re S – O – L. You promote your site by acquiring backlinks — links from other websites that point to yours. When I say the older sites have a head start, I’m talking about backlinks. By now, all the major sites on the Internet (think MySpace, Match.com, Wikipedia, Google, and the other big names in their respective fields) have accumulated hundreds of thousands of links, so attempting to challenge  their ranking for a keyword is an exercise in futility.

This is why we’re targeting long tails — in general, they have less competition, which can often be beaten easily, or sometimes even no competition! However, as more and more people learn about internet marketing and affiliate programs, more and more long tail keywords are seeing heavier competition. This is why it’s important to research the competition before you commit to your keyword.

SEO

When I talk about website promotion, backlinking and keyword competition, all of this falls under the greater gauntlet of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. This is another big piece of the puzzle that you’ll eventually need to understand. For right now, we’re only going to focus on a small part of it.

To use the method I describe for analyzing keyword competition, you’re going to need to download one of the free browsers Opera or Firefox. I definitely recommend Opera, as it’s the fastest, safest, and bestest browser available; many people use Firefox already (though I’ll never understand why. ~_~) You will also need to download and install one of two plugins, depending on the browser you choose:

• SEO for Opera
• SEO for Firefox

Once installed, this plugin will display additional information on the results page when you do a Google or Yahoo search. (Remember Opera users, you’ll need to log out of Google first.)

You’re specifically looking at the PR, or Page Rank, which is the first tag after the result number. Yours will look something like:

#1 | PR: ? |

When you click on the question mark (you can change the settings to make it auto populate,) a value between 0 and 9 will be displayed — this is the Page Rank value assigned by Google. It is a measure of how much authority a website has. The higher the number, the higher the authority, and the harder it will be to outrank for a keyword.

Run all your long tail keywords through Google, and see what first page results look like in terms of PR. If it’s mostly 0′s and 1′s, the keyword will be extremely easy to rank for. Mostly 1′s and 2′s will take a little more effort, and mostly 2′s and 3′s will take more effort still.  3′s and 4′s are do-able, but are probably more difficult than you want to tackle right away. You’ll generally want to avoid anything above a 5.

There are, however, a couple of additional factors to keep in mind. If you take a look at the screenshot of the Google SERP (click the image above) you’ll see that all three results have the search query (“some shit”) in the title; this isn’t always the case. A lot of times high PR sites will rank well for keywords they’re not targeting, simply because they use the phrase somewhere in their text and have good authority in general. This gives you a significant advantage over these sites, even if they’re PR3 or 4, because keyword targeting (aka SEO) is a big part of ranking. This is also true if the text is split up in either the title or the body (for example, “some crazy shit.”)

Easy Online Money, Here We Come!

Time to put an end to this encyclopedic post once and for all! (And no wonder it’s encyclopedic, with me using words like “encyclopedic” all the time. ;P)

On a serious note, there is a TON of great information in this article, more than you’ll need to get started finding profitable keywords. (Now, if you’re planning on actually using them you’ll need to read the article How to Get Money Fast with Blogging.)

Of course, if you’re anything like me, as you gain experience and become more advanced in your understanding and analysis of keywords you’ll definitely be interested in investing in a professional keyword service or software. These combine all the functionality of the various free tools into a convenient central location, and just make life so much easier.

I’ve experimented with a lot of the various services available, and I only recommend two. The software is all fairly standard, but be sure to read the various features each one offers and choose which one suits your particular needs best.

Products:

• Keyword Elite
• Keyword Research Pro
• Micro Niche Finder

Services:

• KeyCompete
• Wordtracker Pro

I’d also like to thank the guys at The Keyword Academy for all the great information they share, much of which has been invaluable in my own ongoing IM education. =)

Of course, if you have any questions, comments, or even additional tips to share, I always look forward to hearing from you! You can get in touch with me via the comments section below or the easy and secure Contact form I provide. Thanks for reading, and good luck making some easy online money!

Tagged as: Afilliate Marketing, cheap, easy, Internet network marketing, Keywords, Make Money, Monetizing, Pay Per Click, SEO

Related posts:

1. Keywords are King
2. Differentiating Between Moneymaking Keywords And Useless Keywords
3. Choosing A Profitable Market
4. 7 Most Popular Money-Making Models Online
5. Enter Residual Income – The Ultimate Money Making Guide