How to use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find search volumes for niche keywords
The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a very useful tool for any affiliate to help find information about keywords and how they are performing in Google’s search engine. This is a very useful tool when thinking of a niche affiliate site so that you can check things like the search volume, the advertiser competition and the average search volumes for those keywords.
Once you have found you niche idea, use the keywords tool to check how many people are searching for those specific keywords. This will help determine if you can potentially make money from your niche site through affiliate links.
The Google Adwords Keyword Tool will also show you the Estimate Average CPC (Cost per click).
For example, this blog site Affiliate project, type in those keywords and below will show you an example screenshot of the keyword CPC, Competition, Search Volume for previous month and Average Search Volume.
Example 1 – showing Google Adwords Keyword Tool for keywords affiliate project in broad term (any match for that search term):
Example 2 – showing Google Adwords Keyword Tool for keywords “affiliate project” in exact term (any match for that exact search term):
As you will see from the 2 screenshots above (hopefully as the images are quite small) that the broad term gets approx 5,400 search hits a month for those keywords. Now people will be typing in those 2 keywords. In the 2nd screenshot our exact search is only 16 on average but was 140 in February, so not many people using the exact search term “affiliate project”.
You can either use those keywords to try and optimise your site via SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) or you can improve your search results by buying these keywords after signing up to have a Google Ads account. Once you add those keywords, this would allow you to be added to the sponsors section on google’s search engine if someone searches for those keywords.
Now an example niche site that we have recently done is power plates or www.powerplates.org.uk , Vibration Fitness machines which are currently quite popular amongst celebrities and sports professionals, so we thought it might be a good niche site with quite a lot of keyword search volume, approx 9,900 in Jan/Feb on average for the exact search term “power plates”. Go ahead and find your niche…
To summarise, follow the basic steps below:
- Go to google adwords keyword tool
- Enter your niche keywords and characters shown to show the results, click Get keyword ideas
- Change the columns to show all
- If keywords entered is more 2 or more words, then change Match type to be exact to give you the exact search for “keyword1 keyword2″ in quotes. This way you can target a specific search.
- Click on the Approx Avg Search Volume to sort by column, this will show the most searches first
New plugin we are using
We noticed that we were getting a lot of spam comments, hundreds a day which uses up time removing them and also bandwidth to our site. So we looked for a plugin to combat this. The simple way we thought was to add a question to the comments section so that spam robots cannot automatically post comments. We came up with the following plugion and so far this seems to be working well for us. If you are having trouble with spam robots hitting your comments, try this plugin.
Math Comment Spam Protection
Asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot.
Our Top Wordpress Plugins
We are utilising more Wordpress plugins as we get better at webdesign and want to add more functionality to our websites. We thought we’d write a review of the ones we’ve used so far.
Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. We have seen an influx of spam comments to our site and this plugin has helped get rid of them to the spam folder where we can review them to make sure they are spam.
All in One SEO Pack
This has been a great tool to help get this site to number 1 on google search. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very important for websites to improve the amount of hits they get.
Similar Posts
Displays a highly configurable list of related posts. Similarity can be based on any combination of word usage in the content, title, or tags. This is very useful to direct readers of your blog to other related content they may be interested in on your site. Requires the latest version of the Post-Plugin Library to be installed.
Social Bookmarks
Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites. You can pick from a large number of social sites which makes this plugin great.
WordPress.com Stats
Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. This is useful for determining how much traffic you are getting and what they are doing once they get there.
Wordpress Popular Posts
Retrieves the most active entries of your blog and displays them on a list. As you can see we use this plugin on our sidebar. It means readers can immediately see which are the most popular articles on a site.
WP125
We use this in our sidebar as well to easily manage 125×125 ads within your WordPress Dashboard. It allows you to run ad campaigns for either a specific amount of time or indefinitely.
Useful tool for affiliates – easycontentunits
As we are getting more and more into affiliate marketing we are coming across more and more useful tools. One we have come across is easycontentunits.com and we think this would be a useful tool for many affiliates. Users can use it for price comparison for a product which has multiple retailers, creating top sellers lists or to highlight similar or related products.
This site allows you to pull in links from merchants of multiple affiliate networks rather than limiting you to only include an affiliate networks own merchants. Have a look and see what you think.
Exploring PPC and PPL
Recently we have been looking at the use of PPC (Pay Per Click) and (PPL) Pay per Lead usage. Pay Per Click is a web based advertising scheme used on search engines and content websites where an advertiser will pay when a visitor to a search engine or content website clicks on the advertiser’s advert and redirects to their company page. Pay Per Lead is where the advertiser will pay per lead that is generated from a click to their website. This lead might be signing up for a newsletter or the person registering their email address for a brochure or documentation.
We have signed up to a couple of agencies and are exloring their use for the affiliate and the return that can be gained. It will be interesting to see the results over time.
What are Backlinks?
Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. So if a website contains a link to a new website or web-page then that link is called a backlink for the destination webpage.
Backlinks are important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The reason for this is that the number of backlinks is one indication of the status or importance of that website or page. The more backlinks a site has, the more popular that website is deemed to be as more people are linking to it. Search engines use backlinks as a way of determining where that website appears in the ranking on search terms. There are other factors involved but improving backlinks is one way to increase the SEO of your website.
We are just discovering backlinks and will be trying to generate some useful, genuine backlinks to our site. To find out the backlinks on a site in Google you can type the following into the search field:
links:www.affiliateproject.co.uk
Linkbacks
What are linkbacks and how do they work. This is something we have just come across having added our blog to the Technorati website. Since we have done this we have some requests for pingbacks. Being new to this we were unsure what pingbacks were so having researched it we thought we’d explain what they are for anyone else new to blogging. A pingback is a form of linkback. Linkbacks come in three forms, refback, trackback and pingback. So what is the difference:-
- Refback – Visitor to linking site clicks on the link, and his browser takes him to the linked site. A Refback uses the HTTP referer header to discover incoming links. Whenever a browser traverses an incoming link from Site A (originator) to Site B (receptor) the browser will send a Referer header indicating the URL from where the user came.
- Trackback – A trackback is a way of letting a website know that you are referencing them or linking them in your posts. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their articles.
- Pingback – This is similar to a trackback. The pingback system is a way for a blog to be automatically notified when other blogs link to it.
So we received pingbacks from some sites because they linked to our Technorati link so we then received a pingback telling us ablog had linked to our post on Technorati.
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