Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program - Lesson 3/13
written by Anthony Dinh
First, I’d like to say thank-you and congratulate you for joining my Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program. You’ve taken the first step in the right direction towards building a successful online business and financial freedom. This 13-step program is your roadmap to wealth, and it’s jam-packed with invaluable information…no tricks or gimmicks here folks, just solid and proven methods that work! SEO (search engine optimization), copywriting and various internet marketing methods will be covered throughout the tutorial. I suggest that you read through it once, let it soak in, try it out, then go back and read it again because you’ll surely pick up something new that you missed the first time around.
Here’s a breakdown of each lesson for your convenience:
Lesson 1 - Set Your Goal
Lesson 2 - Find Your Niche
Lesson 3 - Keyword Sniping
Lesson 4 - Research Affiliate Programs
Lesson 5 - Build a Website Around Your Keyword
Lesson 6 - Incorporate Affiliate Links in Your Posts
Lesson 7 - Build Quality Backlinks
Lesson 8 - Submit Your Site to Web Directories
Lesson 9 - Submit Your Post to Article Directories
Lesson 10 - Add More Content and Build More Backlinks
Lesson 11 - The Waiting Game
Lesson 12 - Tweak Your Site
Lesson 13 - Scale Your Campaign
Before we begin with “Lesson 3 - Keyword Sniping“, please bookmark this page and subscribe to my full RSS feed as there are 13 steps, so you definitely won’t want to miss out! If you are just joining us now, be sure to go back and read “Lesson 1 - Set Your Goal“.
Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program
Lesson 3 - Keyword Sniping
Now that you’ve selected the niche that you want to write about, the next step would be to “snipe” the keyword. When deciding on a keyword to snipe, some factors to consider are:
- The more specific and the more long-tailed the keyword, the fewer the competition, and the easier it will be to obtain a high ranking (i.e. “breast surgery doctor philadelphia” vs “breast surgery”).
- Your keyword should be searched at least 200 times a day, obviously, the more the better. There’s a bunch of keyword search tools out there, but I use WordTracker which shows daily search volumes, and it’s free! You can also use Google’s Keyword Tool if you already have an Adwords account.
- There are fewer than 1 million competing pages returned for this keyword in Google, obviously, the fewer the better. You can determine this by searching “your keyword” with quotes around it.
- The keyword has value to advertisers. Basically, anything that can be sold or has commissions has value.
- Select a keyword that is outside of the techie/internet world. Think of a keyword that your average teen or 70-year-old would likely be searching for. Doing so will not only leave you with fewer competitors, but it will also increase your conversion rate as people who aren’t as tech-savvy are more likely to click on ads.
Just to give you a few ideas and to get your mind going, here are some niches I would consider looking at:
(pest control, lawn care, hair products, acne treatments, teeth whitening, mortgages, loans, debt consolidation, home improvement, baby products, men’s/women’s health, weigh loss, etc.)
Bear in mind that questionable topics such as firearms, ammunition, butterfly knives, brass knuckles, concealable weapons, prescriptions drugs, beer and alcohol, tobacco or tobacco-related products, racial intolerance or gambling will not be not be supported by Google Adsense ads. Check out Google’s Program Policy for a full list.
The daily search volumes and competing pages figures mentioned above are just guidelines that I would stick to until you’re comfortable and have gained more confidence with keyword sniping. Once you achieve a #1 ranking for the long-tail keyword, then you can certainly focus on ranking for the bigger and broader keyword. One big advantage that you already have going for you is that most sites out there are targeting keywords with a single subpage. It’s much easier to obtain a higher ranking if you build a whole site(s) around a keyword as we will be doing in Lesson 5 - Build a Website Around Your Keyword.
To snipe your keyword using Google’s Keyword Tool:
1. first, login to your Adwords account and navigate to Tools->Keyword Tool
2. next, check the “Website Content” radio-button, enter the URL of the site you are going to promote, check the “Include other pages…” checkbox, and click “Get Keyword Ideas”
3. a list of keywords relating to the site you entered will be returned and organized in “groups”, click on the “Avg Search Volume” column to sort the list by highest to lowest search volumes
4. then, copy and paste the top keyword from each group into a text document
5. now search Google for forums where each of the keywords from step4 are being discussed by placing the “keyword” within quotes followed by the word forum: “keyword” forum
6. visit the first forum from the results list and browse through it, looking for additional keywords that are not included in your list. for example, if your list includes “weight loss”, then you wouldn’t add “weight loss excercises” since the phrase matches a keyword that’s already on your list. instead, you want to look for completely different keywords that are the subject of popular discussion threads with many user responses within the forum such as “yoga” or “pilates”
7. taking one word at a time, Google your entire list of keywords and copy down the URLs of all the Adsense ads displayed on page one of the results
8. take the resulting list of URLs from step7 and enter them one at a time back into the Adsense Tools->Keyword Tool->”Website Content” and click “Add all” which will add all the keywords to the selected keywords pane on the right-hand side
You will find that many of the resulting keywords are shared between some of the URLs you entered, but there will be some new ones as well. You now have a very powerful list of valuable keywords related to sites that are willing to pay for them! Click on the “Download these keywords” to your desired text or csv format for safe keeping…this is the list of keywords you will be using to build your affiliate site.
…Next >> Lesson 4 - Research Affiliate Programs
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