Keyword strategy
Do you know how many people search for certain keywords related to your site content?
Do you know how much advertisers pay for those keywords?
When setting up a blog, understanding whether or not a keyword is worthwhile or not is crucial if you are serious about driving traffic to your site and making a profit. I [...]
Do you know how many people search for certain keywords related to your site content?
Do you know how much advertisers pay for those keywords?
When setting up a blog, understanding whether or not a keyword is worthwhile or not is crucial if you are serious about driving traffic to your site and making a profit. I used to think I could blog about anything of interest and the site would eventually get a lot of users by virtue of the fact I thought my blog was interesting. I never thought about keyword research and believed it was too much hard work and hassle to find out more about it. But after reading a lot of sites on the topic and experimenting myself I realized how important it was to understand how many people search for certain keywords and also how much advertisers pay for those keywords.
Fortunately, google keyword tool allows you to easily check how many people are searching for specific keywords by region and also understand the amount advertisers pay for those keywords. But, to make money from any given keyword it should satisfy the following conditions.
1) Sufficient number of people searching for it
- you need a decent number of people looking for your keyword, otherwise there is no point writing about it – unless you are just doing it because you like to write about it.
2) Not too much competition for the keyword
- if there is a large number of really good sites which already cover that keyword, then it will be difficult for you to rank sufficiently and get on the first page of google. If you aren’t on the first page of google for any given keyword then you won’t get many visitors.
3) High value with advertisers
- If advertisers aren’t paying much money for the keyword, even if you have a high ranking site you won’t make much money from it because every time someone clicks on an adsense unit on your site you will only earn a few cents every click. But, if you have a site which focuses on keywords which are worth a lot of money you can earn a decent amount every time someone clicks on an adsense unit. But, if you are looking at creating an e-book and driving traffic by using adwords then you would want to do the opposite – i.e. find low paying keywords so you can easily pay for adwords ads and drive traffic. This is a topic I will go into later.
You may or may not have heard of niche websites. These are websites which focus on specific keywords by using the information above. If your blog or website focuses on a specific subject then you can utilize your knowledge of keywords to easily drive more traffic to your website. It just takes a little patience and persistence.
Choosing a topic to write about
Choosing a topic to write about can be one of the hardest things to do. If you already have a website or topic you are interested in then that is good. But, if you are serious about making some money, you should check whether or not the topics and keywords for that site are profitable or not and whether or not there is strong competition.
Choosing the right keywords
If you choose the right keyword you can create an entire site around that keyword and other keywords associated with the key keyword you choose. For example, you may write about ‘Bass Fishing’, but in addition you have other categories and posts on your site using associated keywords such as ‘Bass Fishing Competitions’, ‘Bass Fishing Lakes’, ‘How to fish for bass’ etc…
There are a lot of ways to brainstorm different ideas. Below is a list of different ways to go about it.
1. Amazon/E-bay
- by searching for various goods on this site will give you a lot of good ideas.
2. Magazines
- there are obviously thousands of magazines out there and browsing through these can give you some great, unique ideas
3. Your hobbies/interests/problems
- If you intend to write your own e-book, then listing up your own hobbies and interests is a great way to brainstorm. A piece of software I use which I find really good is Freemind mindmapping software which is free and allows you to easily view all your ideas on one page.
- Looking at your own problems can also reveal some subject matter which hasn’t been addressed in a comprehensive or easy to understand way.
4. Clickbank
- by looking at which topics sell well you can get an idea of the type of products people are looking for. Go to clickbank and browse subjects. You can filter your search results to search by popularity as well.
This website is very cool and gives you the number of Google searches per month that have been made on any given word or phrase. You can type in a keyword or phrase and it will give you the number of corresponding searches. Try typing in generic terms like ‘how to’ or ‘learn’ or other terms likes this before your keyword. Before you start the search you should change the location to ‘all countries and territories’. You should also change the ‘Match type’ to exact and under ‘Choose columns to display’ you should choose ‘Show Estimated Avg. CPC’. This means the average cost per click that advertisers pay google.
6. Sitepoint Marketplace
- On this site people are constantly selling and buying sites to eachother so it is a good place to see which niches people are making money from.
Before you start analyzing keywords, you should download the SEO for Firefox Plugin which allows you to check the ranking of sites in google. For example, when you do a search in google, by using this tool you can check a number of things including the page rank of a site. If the page rank is 3 or below you have a fairly good chance of beating it. If it is 4 or above the site will most likely be hard to beat.
Keyword value and search volume
- Checking the CPC (cost per click) of any given keyword allows you to tell how much advertisers are willing to pay google for that keyword. For example, if they pay $1 for a keyword, then you will get about 25 cents every time someone clicks on that google ad. You can see below that advertisers pay $1 for the search term ‘bass fishing boats’ and that about 3,600 people per month search for that search term.
Finding the right combination of cost per click ($1 or more), monthly volume (2-3K/month) and low level of competing sites (sites with less than or equal to 3PR) is important. You should make a list in excel with keywords which have this combination.
Once you find the right combination you can then start creating a site around the keyword of your choice. I highly recommend using Wordpress to create your blog. This page shows a few of the blogging options available. As well as the advantage of being able to use your own domain name which means you can re-sell your site in the future if you want to, there is a lot more flexibility with Wordpress over other options such as Blogger.
Writing your first post
Writing a post in Wordpress is simple. Wordpress uses a rich text editor which is essentially like a word processor and has various options such as bolding, italics, underlining, indenting etc. The steps involved in writing a post are as follows:
1. Adding a new post
Click on ‘Add New’ posts on the left hand side [...]
Writing a post in Wordpress is simple. Wordpress uses a rich text editor which is essentially like a word processor and has various options such as bolding, italics, underlining, indenting etc. The steps involved in writing a post are as follows:
1. Adding a new post
Click on ‘Add New’ posts on the left hand side of your dashboard as shown below.
2. Enter a title for your post
This should accurately reflect the content you are writing about in your post. For example, this post is called ‘Your First Post’ which is apt.
3. Write content
This is done in the body of the post (the big white space below the title). You can write what you want but I recommend that you BOLD any titles as this helps identify the content as important and apparently can help your SEO (search engine optimization).
4. Adding an image
To add an image is easy and simply involves clicking on the image icon and then choosing a file to upload. Usually a JPEG or a GIF is the best way to go.
5. Adding video to your blog
Fortunately with Wordpress always evolving, this has become very easy to do. All you have to do is press the ‘Insert/Edit Embedded Media’ and then select your video type and your file. The disadvantage to adding your own video is that it puts a load on your server and can be slower to load, so the user experience may not be so good.
A good alternative is to simply embed a YouTube video. To do this you click on the HTML button (on the right hand side of the Visual tab) and then insert the code.
After you click on Insert/Edit Embedded Media icon above, you will see the window below. Click on General and then insert the code into the File/Url box as shown below. Then your video will appear! To grab this video code from YouTube you simply copy the text which says ‘Embed’ and paste it as below.
Another way to add a video is to click on the icon below
The next screen will look like this (see below). First, Click on the ‘From URL’ link and then go to YouTube and select the ‘Embed Code’ option. Copy this code by doing Ctrl + C or going to edit and copy and then past that code as shown below. Then simply click on ‘Insert into Post’.
6. The ‘More’ button
When you write a post and you don’t want the entire post to display (i.e. an excerpt), you can simply click on the ‘Insert more tag‘ as shown below. Just select the spot you want to insert it and press it. This is very useful and I use it for many of my posts.
Basically, all text above this will display and all text below it will only display when users click on the full post.
7. Saving your post as a draft or publishing it
When you save a post, if you aren’t quite ready to announce it to the world you can save it as a draft. This means you can access it anytime and keep editing it until you are happy with it. If you Publish a post you can also save it as a draft if you change your mind, but try not to do this if possible because once it is published and it is indexed by google then users may get an error when they look for that page. If your site isn’t well known and google doesn’t index it very often then you are probably okay. When you Publish a post, it means it will display on your site and it also means ‘hopefully’ google will index your site and this will be one of the pages it indexes.
8. Deleting your post
If you want to delete your post it’s easy to do from the admin panel. When you click on POSTS in your sidebar there are 4 options – edit/quick edit/delete/view. Click in the checkbox and select which one you want.
Setting up Wordpress
Once you decide on your theme, you need to download the theme to your computer and drag and drop the appropriate folder to your Themes folder by using a FTP Client. Below are the steps involved. When I get around to it I’ll put a video up which will show you how to do this.
Steps [...]
Once you decide on your theme, you need to download the theme to your computer and drag and drop the appropriate folder to your Themes folder by using a FTP Client. Below are the steps involved. When I get around to it I’ll put a video up which will show you how to do this.
Steps to setting up Wordpress
1. Decide on a Wordpress theme
2. Download the theme folder to your PC
3. Download a FTP Client (I recommend Filezilla) to your computer. You can download from this page:
http://filezilla-project.org/download.php
This is free software and very easy to use.
4. Run the Filezilla FTP client and enter the appropriate Host, Username and Password.
5. Drag and drop the theme folder you just downloaded into the Themes Folder in your FTP Client (e.g. Drag and drop the theme from your desktop – e.g. Thesis theme folder – illustrated below on the right and drop it in the Themes folder, which located in the wp-content folder.When you do this you will see a whole lot of information being transferred. This means the theme is now being uploaded to your host (e.g. Bluehost) so when you open your URL you will see the generic Wordpress theme.
6. Activate the theme
- go to the domain name you registered and go to the admin area. Type in the name of your URL and at the end of it put wp-admin. For example, www.settingupablog.net/wp-admin. This will take you to the admin area of your Wordpress site. You will have been sent a username and password so put those in.
- You now have access to your admin area which allows you to do admin type stuff – e.g. change your theme, activate plugins, write posts and blog away.
- Go to the tab on the left hand side which says ‘Appearance’. You will see Themes, so click on ‘Themes’. Below, you will have a list of themes to choose from. Click on the ‘Activate’ button on the theme you just chose.
And that’s it – you’ve set up your Wordpress theme and are ready to blog away!
