Free Keyword Research Tools
Well, you’ve heard me go on and on about keyword research, and I’ve showed you the tools I use for my research, along with my reasons for using them. But today I wanted to share with you some free
tools for keyword research.
These tools are powerful, but very cumbersome. While I like the data that they spit out, they require far too much time and their results are far less actionable than the ones I get with Micro Niche Finder and Keyword Elite. However, depending on your needs, and the volume of keyword research that you do, you might find them helpful.
So here they are, in no particular order. Try them out on a niche that you’re investigating — they’re all free:
Google Keyword Metrics Tool
Searches for PPC maximum bid, search volume, competition, sample ads, and expected AdSense revenues for a niche keyword. This is one of my favorite free keyword tools, but I find that the data tend to be misleading.
http://www.technobloggie.com/keyword-tool/index.php
Google Sets
This is a neat tool from Google Labs that creates sets of keywords revolving around a main keyword. No search or competition data is made available, so you wouldn’t use this for keyword research; rather, you’d use it to make sure your latent semantic indexing was optimized (advanced search topic).
Google Trends
This is a tool I frequently use when validating a chosen niche that I’ve found through keyword research. It shows you search trends over time, so that you can tell if your niche popularity is on the upswing or if you’re too late to capitalize on it, or if your niche receives more search traffic during certain times of the year.
SEO Keyword Density Tool
You can use this tool to analyze your pages and posts to determine their keyword density. A “natural” density tends to be around 1 percent, but for an optimized post or site, you’ll want to shoot for 2 percent or more.
http://websitetips.com/seo/tools/keywords/#freekeywordanalysis
Keyword Spy
If you are targeting a niche, type your keywords in here to see who your largest paid competitors are (those using AdWords).
Blogging in Action’s Keyword Sheriff
“Wait, you guys have your own keyword tool, but you still use Keyword Elite?” Yes, that’s right! The biggest problem with our keyword research tool is that it doesn’t paint a complete picture. But it might provide you with just the information you need to move forward.
http://www.BloggingInAction.com/files/Keyword-Sheriff.zip
I hope you find these tools helpful. They’re certainly no replacement for a proper keyword research tool, but they can give you some additional information that you can use for research or validation.
Keyword Advantage #2: Piggyback your Competitors’ Efforts
The topic of this e-mail is near and dear to my heart because it has saved me tons of money and countless hours of frustration over the past two years.
Google AdWords is a tremendous advertising platform. It has never been easier or cheaper to gain new customers than through the use of AdWords. But getting the most out of your AdWords campaigns can
be brutally difficult.
Keyword selection is paramount. You must choose keywords that will attract the right number of clicks, but you want to avoid those keywords with too much competition or you’ll find yourself paying an astronomically high cost-per-click rate. And it’s also imperative that you break your keywords into logically related campaigns, or you’ll have great difficulty getting your bearings.
Then you have to worry about ad copy. It takes thousands of impressions and hundreds of clicks just to test a few ads. What if you need to target several audiences? You might find yourself paying for several thousand clicks to determine which ad leads to the most clicks and which ad converts the best.
What if you could select the perfect keyword groupings, with high search traffic but little competition? That’s a few problems solved.
But better, what if you could let someone else — let’s make it your competitors — pay for testing the perfect ads for you? It doesn’t sound possible, does it? But it is, and the answer is obvious, but just as painful to carry out — unless you have Keyword Elite.
If your company is selling widgets with Google AdWords, what would you do with your worst performing ads? Ditch them quickly, I bet. And what would you do with your best-performing ads? Show them as
frequently as possible, unless you like flushing money down the toilet. Therein lays the answer. (Not the toilet part!)
To determine the best ads for your keywords, you monitor your keywords for three to four weeks, and collect statistics on which ads are displayed when searches are performed. The more often an ad appears in the search results, the more confident you can be that the ad is profitable. If after three weeks, you see that one ad shows up far more frequently than others for your keywords, you then have just the template to use as the basis for an ad.
You’ve effectively piggybacked off of all of the effort and expense your competitor wasted perfecting the ad! Keyword Elite does this automatically for you, for as many keywords as you want. You could
monitor competition in hundreds of keywords with just a few clicks of the mouse.
This is incredibly powerful. Whenever I will be doing an AdWords campaign, I start spying on the competition weeks in advance. When my campaign launches, I’m usually able to find a winning ad in under $100 and two weeks, vs. several hundred dollars over the course of a few months.
When time and speed to market are important to you, this feature is a godsend. Stop wasting time and money, and start using Keyword Elite! It will help you find exactly which keywords and which ads will convert for YOU.
I would strongly urge you to view the video of this process in action, because it will answer some questions you have and show you how easy and effective this tactic can be. Check out the “Project Number 5″ video. It’s amazing to see this in action.
Keyword Advantage #1: Optimize your Pages Effectively
You’ve probably seen already why I love using keyword research tools so much, but in case you haven’t, I’ll recap my top reasons for using them. Of course, the sky’s the limit with these kinds of tools, because they give you access to *data.* Once you have that data, you can do all kinds of neat things with it (we’ll look at some of those things in the future). All of those things can be packaged pretty neatly into these categories:
- You can attract more search referrals
- You can attract higher-quality traffic (EXTREMELY important; traffic is no good unless it’s qualified — keyword research is how you qualify it)
- You can “predict” what your readers want to see in your pages and posts
- You can quickly and easily increase the relevance and keyword density of your pages
- All of which lead to higher profitability per visitor (that really is the bottom line, isn’t it?)
Optimizing Page Content with Keyword Elite
Rather than getting into an overly technical explanation of page optimization, let’s just review a scenario-based description of using Keyword Elite to help you target the content of your page.
In this example, you are going write a blog on . . . creating a blog! We’re going to assume that you create your blog and are able to achieve a top 10 ranking for your targeted keywords. To keep things simple, we’ll further assume that you aren’t selling any products, but have decided to monetize your blog only with AdSense.
Without keyword research:
If you’re experienced, you’ll at least brainstorm some keywords that represent the theme of your blog. You settle on “create blog,” “blogging how-to,” “blogging for beginners,” and “build blog.” Simple enough. So you write content, deploy your blog, market it extensively, and you’re able to achieve a Google top 10 ranking. Congratulations!
Now it’s time to rake in some cash, right? Not so fast! You check your AdSense account and find yourself earning $1.10 per day. One dollar for all of your work?? What gives?
1) There weren’t many searches for your keywords; 2) there was high competition for your keywords; 3) your click-through rate hovered around 1% because your pages weren’t focused enough.
With keyword research:
You plug your four keywords into Keyword Elite and find that the most effective keywords for your blog are actually “how to start a blog,” “make a blog,” “how do I create a blog,” and “how do i start a blog.” You know these are the most effective because Keyword Elite suggested these keywords to you based on their high KEI.
The keyword effectiveness indicator (KEI) takes factors such as the number of searches and the amount of competition into account to help determine keyword profitability. Obviously, if you use keywords
that have little competition, but are searched for frequently, you’ll do much better. Keyword Elite tells you that.
After determining your top keywords, you run another Keyword Elite project to analyze your competition. Keyword Elite will review the top pages for your keywords, and let you see how heavily optimized
they are. If you see one that is off-the-charts optimized, take a look at how they did it and emulate their tactics. If you see a hole, then you’ve got a good shot at ranking highly provided you do your work.
Now it’s time to rake in some cash, right? Correct! You check your AdSense account and find yourself earning $27.52 per day. What gives?
1) You chose the exact keywords that were being searched for the most in your niche; 2) you chose keywords with low competition; 3) You created targeted, optimized content that yielded a click-through rate approaching 5%.
That’s a 2500% increase over choosing your own keywords! In this example, from one optimized site, you could earn $800 additional per month! If you aren’t choosing keywords to focus your content, why
aren’t you? And if you are choosing keywords, why aren’t you using Keyword Elite?
It’s never too early and it’s never too late to perform keyword research.
To find out more about how you can use Keyword Elite to improve your search rankings, focus your content, and earn more money, there are some great videos available for you to watch. Check out the “Project #2″ video to see the above tactics in action!
Niche Research Tools: Finding Hot Topics for Blog Posts
I’ve told you before that I like to use auto-pilot sites and blogs to bring in passive income. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about how I find great niches to attack with these auto-pilot sites. I addressed these questions in the auto-pilot group, and I thought I’d mention them to you because they can be used in conjunction with keyword research to find hot blog topics to post about. Hot topics with low competition equals traffic to your blog!
Before I mention these free research tools, if you have any interest in earning passive income from auto-pilot sites, you’ll want to check out the auto-pilot members group (and claim two free case study e-books).
Believe me when I tell you that finding a good niche isn’t easy, but it very much becomes second nature after you do it for a few months. You begin to notice patterns here and there, which lead to hunches, and those hunches can then be validated pretty easily. Provided you know how to validate them.
So here are some of the free online services I use to validate my niche research. Using these services will alert you to what people are searching for today, and if you can tie what they want to one of your new blog posts, you can capitalize on this extra search traffic.
So here they are, in no particular order:
Yahoo! Buzz
———–
http://buzzlog.buzz.yahoo.com/overall/
The Lycos 50
————
http://50.lycos.com/
Google Trends
————-
http://google.com/trends
Trendhunter Popular List
————————
http://www.trendhunter.com/popular
AOL Hot Searches
—————-
http://hotsearches.aol.com/
eBay Pulse
———-
http://pulse.ebay.com/
current.com’s Google Current
—————————-
http://current.com/topics/76253632_google_current?sort=currentness
Barnes & Noble Bestseller List
——————————
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bestsellers/top100.asp
You probably noticed a pattern in the above, which should point to another success factor that you should try to address with your niche research: find a hot niche, attack it quickly, and generate traffic ASAP. That’s how you capture search traffic and Page Rank. Provided that your blog is seeded with content and you’re using the Google XML Sitemap plug-in, your new posts should be ranking in Google’s index very quickly.
Forum Marketing: Hated, But Devastatingly Effective!
If I had to name one thing that shocks more people about blogging than any other topic, it’s traffic generation. Namely, that there is no “magic” tool that will send hordes of visitors to your blog for no effort. Rather, it’s a systematic and labor-intensive process to build readership over time.
Sure, I use traffic programs like Traffic Kahuna, Ethic Links, and the like, but they are just tools that help me manage the work that must be done. The bottom line is that no matter how they’re wrapped up, and no matter what fancy names people apply to them, the top traffic generation methods are simple. Today I’d like to go into a little more detail about one of those effective methods: forum participation.
The concept is simple:
1) Find good forums in your niche that use “dofollow” links, meaning the “nofollow” attribute is absent. Good means high traffic, high Page Rank forums that allow signatures.
2) Create a profile, learn the rules of the forum, and create an effective signature.
3) Post frequently on each forum, visiting several times a week, and write good posts. No spam!
Proper execution, though, is lost on 90 percent of those who try forum marketing. Here are some additional tips to help you market your blog effectively through the forums.
1) Fill out your profile completely, and show off your personality. You’re trying to attract readers! Give forum viewers an opportunity to see what they’ll find on your blog each day. That includes a GOOD avatar. Silly, but it makes a big difference.
2) FOCUS. Limit posting to 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, whatever. Time your efforts and constantly remind yourself to stay focused. You’re participating, yes, but participating with a purpose. Be careful that you don’t end up browsing and lurking.
3) Shoot for 10 good posts per forum per week. A good post is filled with good, informational content.
4) Make a list of your top blog posts, their URL’s, and related keywords. Use the list to help you find the right discussions.
5) If you can’t find the right discussion, create them. Ask a question, solicit opinions, and be sure to state your position.
6) Craft a compelling signature. Point to your anchor posts, a special offer, a review page, a freebie. This serves two purposes: increases your direct traffic and builds a deep backlink to your blog.
7) If you don’t have time (or the will) to make these posts, find someone on Elance who will post for you. Post a descriptive project, make sure the poster has good writing skills, give him or her posting guidelines (length, frequency, quality). Be specific!
It’s always best to go with someone who already has knowledge in your niche. I usually request an average of 10 posts per day for 10 days, for a price of $100. I also request no active promotion — just participation and a signature file. When the contract is complete, I retain rights to the posting account so that I can change the signature for any future promotion effort. Instant links!
Track your results. You need to track the traffic you get from each forum so you know which efforts to ramp up and which ones to cut off. “You can expect what you inspect.” Measure everything!
This isn’t rocket science, but it requires effort. And this is what turns most people off blog promotion. You need to virtually shake a lot of hands to build good readership, but the effort will pay off in the long run.
To speed this process up, you can use software — not for spamming, but for managing your comment campaign. The software will help you manage your accounts, manage your logins, track the forums that
you’ve posted in, track responses to your posts, and so on. Not such a big deal when you only post to one forum, but when you’re managing 20-30 accounts, it becomes a lifesaver.
How much does this software cost? Why, it’s free for members of this group! Download it here
Good luck with your promotion efforts.
Using Keywords to Title Your Blog Posts
This is another topic that is so vital that it can’t be said enough. You absolutely MUST pay attention to the keywords you are focusing your content around if you want to maximize your search traffic and improve your blog’s profitability. Here are a few reasons why you should do keyword research:
- It helps you keep your blog content tightly focused
- It helps you determine which post titles will attract the most search traffic
- It helps you gauge competition
- It helps you attract highly qualified traffic
- It allows you to see how much search traffic there is for a niche
- It prevents you from wasting time on topics that aren’t searched or profitable
All of which lead to more relevant content, which is the cornerstone of highly profitable contextual advertising. Profitability isn’t everything, but we all have to eat!
As an example, say you were given a choice between a truckload of peaches or a truckload of pears to sell at a farmer’s market. What would you choose? Probably whichever one you liked the best, but
the question you would be asking is “Which fruit sells the best?” If you knew that, on average, 100 peaches sold every day at the market, but 1000 pears sold every day, you would choose pears in a
heartbeat. That’s what keyword research tells you: exactly what people are looking for every time they search; but even better, it allows you to find out how much competition there is for a keyword.
Keyword research is not an optional activity for professional bloggers. It is a necessity. This is one of the things that will set you apart from all of those people who are killing themselves trying to churn out a few Adsense dollars each day. You’ve simply got to do it.
Craft a Compelling Title with Keywords
For each of your anchor posts, you should be doing keyword research. This doesn’t mean that you should limit your writing to only those topics that generate search traffic, but it does mean that you should describe your posts in such a way that they attract maximum traffic.
The process is just as you would expect. Extract the keywords from your post, and plug them into your keyword software. Your software will present you with a long list of related keywords that you might not have even thought of. Analyze those words with the software and look for the number of searches, the number of competing results, and the KEI, which is a measurement of the effectiveness of a keyword. A good strategy is to keyword the title and first paragraph of your story with those words with the highest KEI’s.
It’s a wonderfully simple way to grab extra search traffic, and many of your competitors aren’t doing it, so get a leg up on them!
Learn More About Keywords + Free e-books
Keywords are so important that I address keyword topics exclusively in another member group. Learn more about keyword research or join this group. I am giving away two free e-books, “AdSense Arbitrage” and “AdWords Made Easy,” for new members of this group. I hope you’ll join us because we have plenty of great tips to share!
Good luck and USE YOUR KEYWORDS!
What to Do When You Run Out of Content Ideas
I’m guessing that you’re right in the thick of things by now, hopefully generating unique content hand over fist. But I wanted to address what happens when you run out of ideas — and it will happen! Here are some ideas to help you uncover new blog posts, or worst case scenario, give you content even when you’ve run out of ideas for new posts. Don’t worry, if it does happen, it’s just temporary.
How to Find Content Inspiration
1) Subscribe to like-minded blogs. What are they writing about? Can you respond to a post, add to a post, or dispute a post of theirs? Do their posts give you any ideas?
Don’t short-change this tactic. You will be amazed at the number of posts you can create by pseudo-collaborating with other bloggers, and it’s also a great way to get links and establish your credibility.
2) Browse forums in your field. What are people talking about? What problems are they having?
3) Try StumbleUpon! You can find clever, inspiring content with a few clicks.
4) Create a video of yourself doing something in your niche or completing a task. What’s second-nature to you could be news to someone else.
5) Review your blog comments — write about a common thread in those comments, or answer them in a new post.
6) Use Twitter! With Twitter, I really feel like I have my fingertips on the pulse of the niches I follow.
7) Write a tutorial.
Review a new service, business, web site, or book in your niche. This also gives you a way to earn some commissions. You could even set up a regular review day — maybe once every two weeks or so.
9) Interview your peers, and posts the results. Most bloggers are open to surveys from their peers, provided that it doesn’t look like social climbing.
“I Have NOTHING to Blog About!”
1) Write a recap post. Recap the week’s events, recap your favorite blog posts over the past week, recap the comments left on your blog, etc.
2) Start reaching out to guest bloggers. You can create an author account in your WordPress blog, allowing them to write content, but not publish it.
3) Use private label content (PLR). Private label content can be purchased, rewritten, and rebranded. Its quality varies, with the best stuff being available from PLR Pro. They limit distribution to 200 people and it’s well-written. Another option is InfoGoRound. The quality is not quite as good, and the content is not as exclusive, but it’s cheaper and you’re not limited to whatever the content of the month is.
Almost all other PLR content I have found is very, very, very, very bad.
4) Take a break, gather your best post ideas from the past, and go on a blog commenting campaign (see the book for how to do this). You can gain traffic, backlinks, and find ideas at the same time.
Writer’s block happens to every blogger from time to time, but if approached methodically, there’s no reason that it should slow you down.
Watch your Blog’s Tagline
I wanted to take a few moments today to address a very common situation that occurs after one first installs Wordpress and begins tinkering around with its themes and plug-ins.
Keep your Header and Tagline Synched
Wordpress is a snap to customize. Find a theme you like, upload and unzip it, then apply it and you’re done. Further customizations can be done in the theme editor or by editing the images that install with the theme.
Because it’s so easy, it’s very common to experiment with themes, jumping from theme to theme, attempting to find one that “fits” with the overall style of your blog. I gravitate towards newspaper themes, because they provide multiple template options, the front page can be easily customized, and because they are able to convey a lot of information and advertising in a small piece of real estate. By the way, be sure to check out the premium themes in Chapter 8 — many of those themes are very hard to track down, so you won’t find too many people using them.
The situation that I see very often is that a custom theme completely replaces the textual header that contains your blog name and headline. When you look at your blog, all looks well, because you see the header that shipped with the theme. The problem is in your RSS feed however, which pulls your blog description from the “Options” tab. This description is vital for folks who might be searching for relevant blogs at blog or RSS directory sites, so it’s important that you keep it updated.
The moral: always keep your tagline in the “Options” tab of your blog’s control panel in synch with the text that might be on any custom header you use.
Wordpress, Migration, and a Free e-book
Wordpress is a very popular and professional blogging platform, but not EVERYONE uses it. I received an e-mail last night asking why I focused exclusively on Wordpress in Blogging in Action.
Chapter 3 discusses many of the reasons, but I can really narrow it down to just one, and it’s a biggie:
Wordpress is Future-Proof: it is constantly updated, entirely customizable, and you control the installation from top to bottom. There is other software out there (like Movable Type) that is similar, but Wordpress is backed by a very strong community. To make a recommendation, I need to be very certain that the product WILL work for you. Wordpress is the only blogging platform that I can recommend with 100 percent confidence.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a successful blog on another platform, like Blogger for example. But your chances of long-term success are much higher with Wordpress, and my role is to point you
towards those things that will improve your odds of success by the greatest amount — hence, Wordpress.
WordPress Migration Guide
If you’re not on WordPress, but are considering a move, do your research. A carefully crafted plan is the way to go. Prepare for the unexpected so that it goes as smoothly as possible.
Please use the e-book I’ve prepared for you with my compliments. The guide is a comprehensive look at the many topics you should address during migration, and has received a lot of great feedback
from the blogging community.
Conquer your Blogging Fears
I think I know what you might be thinking.
I think you want to start a blog. Or you are at least considering starting a blog. You might not have a firm idea in your head about what you hope to accomplish, but you are still entertaining the idea.
Here are the three most common thoughts I hear at this stage:
1) “I know it can be done, but I’m not sure if I can do it.”
This is a common thought, and it’s one of the reasons for this e-mail group. Each of these tips should provide you with concrete steps you can take to get a little closer to your goals. If you’ve been implementing the tips, you already know that you CAN do it.
If you haven’t been, then please give it a try, but try it with the full program rather than with these tips. Why? Because the full program starts at the very beginning, and each chapter builds upon the last. You have nothing to lose, and my program makes it very easy to start, even for total newcomers. Try it!
2) “I don’t think I have the time.”
Setting up a true six-figure blog does take some time, so I understand this line of thinking completely. My solution has always been to find ways to free up my time so that I can then focus on six-figure blogging.
So how do you free up your time? You create several passive income streams quickly. After those income streams are created, you can use the passive money earned to work less and delegate more. If it can be done over the phone or via the internet, you can find someone to do it for you inexpensively. That time can then be spent building your blog.
So the action plan is to start earning passive income with auto-pilot sites. Once you have several auto-pilot sites, start your six-figure blog. Hint: to make your auto-pilot sites even more effective, attach a high-quality blog and maximize your chances of success.
3) “I’m not really sure that I know what I want to do.”
Most people with concerns related to this are looking at ways to make a secondary income stream, and have considered blogging as a way to provide that stream. If you find yourself in this situation, you need to take some kind of action quickly. There are plenty of ways to earn a secondary income, but you can’t start earning until you start working.
I’d urge you to send me an e-mail. Tell me a little about what you hope to accomplish, what you’re looking to do, where your interests lie, and so on. I have been working online since 1994, and have tried (both succeeded and failed) at numerous ventures. Perhaps I can point you in the right direction. Even if it’s not with one of my products, I’d like to help you move forward.
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” Whatever that step is for you, take it. Take it today. The timing is never just right, so take the chance while you can and don’t look back.
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