I get asked a lot about how to find the most effective keywords for either a blog, article or any other content driven page for affiliate marketing. So I decided to make a quick tutorial on how to find the most profitable keywords using only free keyword research tools. We won’t be relying on any paid keyword tools like keyword elite or any other keyword software program as I wanted to show how you really don’t need these programs to find keywords. In fact for the purpose of this tutorial, we are only going to use 3 tools; Googles free keyword suggestion tool, wordtrackers free keyword tool and google search itself.

Now I also wanted to also show a working example in progress, so I also decided to show how I went about creating this tutorial and how I chose the keywords that I chose for the purpose of writing this tutorial. I feel by showing you how I did this it’ll give you ideas on to apply this keyword strategy to your own blog and articles and help you make more money with clickbank or other affiliate marketing programs. Ok, enough with the tutorials preamble let’s get to it.

By the end of the tutorial hopefully you see how I chose for this post the following keywords,

free keyword research
keyword marketing research
keyword elite
find keywords
profitable keywords
effective keywords
keyword strategy
most popular keyword
using keywords

Now for you keeners out there, you’ll notice that I have used most of these keywords already in this tutorial, so let’s now take a look at how I got here. The first step to in finding effective keywords is to fire up googles free suggestion tool. First let me say that as I did my screen grabs for this tutorial and sized them down I lost some resolution so forgive me, I should have taken the screen grabs at a lower rez so the image would be closer to your eye..but I think you’ll get the idea

Ok in this first screen grab you can see I just did a quick inquiry on the general term “keyword research”. Now a lot of people don’t really like Googles tool because it gives you the results in bar graph form, and I’m no exception here so I like to import the results in Excel to help me make sense of the data better. The easiest way to do that for people who don’t know is the scroll down to the end of the list and click on csv for excel see second screen grab for what I mean. Just simply click on the middle option and open in Excel. I know this may seem boring to some of you, but I keep in mind I am trying to walk people through how I do this.

Screen Grab2

This third screen grab is where things get interesting. First thing you will notice is excel converts all that crappy bar graph information and displays it as a number. This is a lot better in helping you find the most popular keywords a lot easier. At least you can make sense of a number, right? Ok quickly sort out the columns so you can read the data and the first thing I do is create 2 columns to the right of googles results. You don’t have to name them what I did, it’s just what I prefer to do. Since the quality of my screen grabs is low here is the 2 forumulas I use.

=average(Avg Search Volume, Advertiser Competition) . Now I know this is making an average of an average but it’s a fast and easy way to help qualify the result into 1 number. I do this mainly because if I am trying to market a niche or product from clickbank, I do not want to spend days trying to create a keyword strategy, I want to quickly find the most profitable keywords and identify the ones I might use for articles, blog post titles etc..so again this formula help me to do just that..

The next formula I use is simply a TRUE/FALSE statement. The formula is

=E2 <.6

What I am doing is just a quick and dirty way to sort the list into true and false. What I am doing is trying to find the quick low hanging fruit. I want to find keywords that are not already saturated by my competition but have enough search volume to make it worth my while targeting. You can chose whatever value you want I just like to use <.6 as a rough quick and dirty value. Anything higher then .6 will probably be either too saturated or if I will be running a PPC campaign on it be more costly per click. The following screen grab now shows the results from these 2 formulas.

You can see here the correlation I am talking about the 2 keywords, “keyword research” and “keyword research tool”, fail my criteria right off the bat. It is also interesting to note that they have a high competition value as well a 1 and a 0.93 that’s high. So more then likely these are not the most profitable keywords, in fact they will probably be the most expensive ones.

Picture 6 needs some explanation so you understand how I get to this point in my keyword strategy. Ok when I started researching for this tutorial, I used both result tables from googles suggestion tool. The starting result was over 200 keywords. Again my goal is to find the most effective keywords that has the potential to drive the most traffic to this tutorial blog post, and also have the potential to be the most cost effective as well in terms of PPC campaigns. So using Excel’s AUTO FILITER I start deleting keywords. I delete right off the bat all my “false” items, then I delete out any other results that are high in the competition department. Then I delete out any of the keywords that don’t have enough search volume I feel make it worth my effort. The finally I look at my results and start deleting out keywords that I think don’t fit the topic of article, blog etc. So screen grab number 6 represents the final possible keyword list. I have now trimmed the keywords from over 200 to now only 24 effective keywords.

Screen grab number 7 shows where most of the leg work starts. I like to keep all my keyword marketing research in one excel file. It’s easier to work with, it makes it quick for me to use as a guide when making articles and just plain saves me a lot of time. So I makes 3 more columns. One, for the results from wordtrackers free tool and two columns for google search results. Some internet marketers will only look at the google search results with “” surrounding the keyword, I like to look at both. It only takes 2 extra seconds to do, and sometimes you can see dramatic differences. Also sometimes you can’t always avoid high google results in your filtered keyword list, so sometimes you will just have to try and compete on those keywords. That’s just the name of the game. For the purpose of this tutorial this became the case as you can see.

To get all the data here in these three columns you need to simply cut and paste each keyword into wordtracker and into google search. Now something interesting happened here. Wordtracker isn’t giving me any daily search volumes on all of my remaining keywords here except for 4. Does this mean all the rest of the keywords in my list of 24 are garbage, no it doesn’t, it’s just something to take notice of. Now I also cut and pasted into the columns the total search results with quotes around my keywords and without. You can see here that one of wordtracker results is also something that has a high search result number. This is what I am talking about sometimes you have to use and try and compete on these keywords. My last keyword on this list was, “using keywords” wordtrackers reports a daily search volume of 27 that’s decent but there are 1.4 million competing pages using that keyword. Ouch pretty tough to get on the first page, but since only 4 keywords from wordtracker gave me anything, I think I’ll trust wordtracker and use all four keywords and go for it.

The basic idea here is to try and find keywords that both have enough daily search volume to make it worth trying to make money on and low enough search results that your blog post, article etc might get indexed on the front page of google. I like to try and go for keywords that have at least 10 daily hits. The reason being, 10 times 30 days is 300 possible hits. Say for example my blog post or article did get indexed on the front page, not everyone is going to click through but I have a potential pool of 300 monthly visitors on this keyword. So if you figure if I can pull 50% of those to click to my page then I’m pitching to 150 now..A dramatic drop, it’s also a dramatic drop to my potential sales as well. If the clickbank product I decided to push converts at say 5% then I might have 7 potential sales on this keyword. So if I start targeting lower daily values of less then 10 you can see how my potential sales for that keyword start dropping. This is what we are doing here in this exercise trying to find and weed out profitable keywords. In this case wordtracker wasn’t too kind to me, so while I will use all 4 results, I also won’t rely on it either. For the most part you’ll discover when you target a niche wordtracker will give you more information then this tutorial pulled. But hey I’m keeping it real.

In conclusion,

I hope this tutorial helped you see how you can do free keyword research without a paid tool like keyword elite to find the most profitable keywords for your niche. Again I usually save out this file and use it as a guide now. This list of 24 keywords could turn into 50 articles, and depending on the niche I’m targeting this is exactly what I’ll do. Remember the key to making money with keywords is not only finding effective keywords but also now dominating the net with those keywords you have found. Create blogs with these keywords in your title, write articles using these keywords the idea is anyone searching for this term will find your blog post or article everywhere on the net. The more they see “you” the more likely they will click.