Anatomy of an Affiliate Promotion – Part 2

When you open Keyword Elite 2, the first thing you want to select if Keyword Surge.

1. Add your initial search query.
2. Unselect the Keyword Elite Engine. This has to return the most irrelevant terms I’ve ever seen.
3. Choose Ask.com, Google Suggestion Tool, and the FreeKeywords WT (Wordtracker) keyword sources.

I set my results to return parameter between 300-500 (if it’s a general market like Health and I’m trying to identify a niche, I may even bump this up to 1000. The issue with that is that around keyword 500, the results being returned are so far off topic that it’s ridiculous.

4. Once the parameters have been set, click Start.

The first filter I set is the number of words within a keyword. I only want relevant long-tail keywords, so I set this filter to only return keywords with a minimum of 4 words in the keyword.

The second filter I set is the number of searches per month. This is an estimation, but I like to set it regardless. I only want keywords with a minimum of 1000 searches per month.

In this step, I surround my keywords with quotes and then Select all for export.

I then right click on the selected results and choose Send keyword to Market Research Sleuth. What this will do is take my initially filtered terms and get me the competition data.

I take the default options here and click Start.

Since I’m looking for low competition keywords with a decent search volume, my next step is to filter the number of competing pages. if a keyword has too few competing pages, then chances are there’s also no advertising, so eliminate these right off the bat. I also don’t want to compete with a keyword with more than 15,000 pages, since it may be more difficult to rank for these terms.

Now the question may be why does it matter if there are advertisers?

The quick answer is ‘odds of profitability’.

If there are no advertisers present, one may wonder if the term is worthy of optimizing for since no one paying for traffic considers that term worthy of spending money on it.

While this isn’t always the case, it is more often than not.

While we set the previous filter at 500, now we are going to set the Campaigns filter to a min value of 2.

So why didn’t I leave the previous filter set to 0 and just filtered out the non-advertisers here?

Keyword Elite 2.0 doesn’t have a proxy system, so too many queries will get your IP banned from Google for at least 30 minutes. My taking that initial filter to 500, we reduce the number of queries being thrown at Google.

Here’s where the fun begins, I like to sort my Searches from most to least. This will often give me the primary term I will focus on.

When will I *not* focus on this term?

If it’s a trademarked term, I often ignore it. Most people don’t, but I’m the one writing this blog post.

Now you need to remove filtered results that are meaningless to your target promotion. What you have left are the keywords you will send off to your writing staff.

Congrats! You now know how to conduct EFFECTIVE keyword research.

Ok, ok… I have to address one more thing here.

There’s a lot of talk about ‘Silo’s’. Some people are die-hard silo freaks. Let me put this issue to rest…

When you are going after the low search volume, low competition terms, silo structuring is meaningless.

If going after competitive markets with higher competition and higher search volumes, then it will give you an edge over those that are not using it.

I USE SILO’S MYSELF, but only when the competition and search volume demand it.

I hope you found this post helpful.

In part 3, I will discuss the technology I use for site building, how to configure it, and why.