Affiliate Project gets better at SQL
This affiliate business is a steep learning curve and this is great. We are not afraid of learning. During our 6 month journey so far we have learnt many things a few of which are Web Design, SEO and pulling data feeds but one of area we are recently really improving our knowledge in is SQL.
With the sites that we are currently doing we are mainly using product feeds and we often get these from different merchants and each merchant has their own way of doing their feeds. So we are getting better and better and pulling the right data out of these feeds and manipulating it in the way we need to to make sure our sites are displaying the best selection of products and the right products for the pages the customers are looking at. This involves using quite complex SELECT statements with a variety of arguments, joining table outputs together and then getting results on the joined information.
Both Gary and I have found this really interesting. SQL is a great tool and thinking it through in your mind and on paper about how to get the correct information out of a database and into tables and displayed on the web page is both an interesting and challenging task.
Google Docs – a useful tool for us
If you regularly read this blog you will know there are two of us on this project. We write lots and lots of documentation that we need to both access as at the moment we use Google Docs to do this. This is a great tool as we can both access and change documents at the same time, and even msg each other while we are doing so through google docs. What tools do you other affiliates use to store and share your documentation? Would be interested to know if there are better ways of doing this but for now Google Docs is great for our needs as remote affiliates.
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
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