Keyword Research for Adsense Blogging

So you have decided to start of your internet business with adsense blogging.  If you haven’t already, I would recommend that you read my article on Keyword Research Basics before reading this.

Let me start off by saying that the methods I am going to teach you here (as well as in a healthy percentage of the other articles on this site), I learned from The Keyword Academy.  They have in depth videos and tools that make this whole process a lot easier.  They do cost $33 a month, but they do offer a 30 day trial for $1.  I highly recommend them.

So, in order to make sure that you are focusing your efforts on keywords that will make money with adsense, and that you can rank well on Google for, you need to do some research.  Without the proper research, you will either get too little traffic, or the traffic that you do get will not pay enough to make your efforts worthwhile.  How to do that research is what I am going to show you here.

Get some keyword ideas – The first thing you need to do is come up with ideas for keywords.  Often times people will find it easiest to focus around their areas of interest.  If you like horseback riding, you can start there.  Are you into auto racing?  Try that.  Another great idea is to go to places like amazon.com or ebay and browse around looking for products that interest you.  Open up notepad and make a list.  It should look like this:

horseback riding

auto racing

exercise heart monitors

solar garden lights

etc…

Make your list at least 10 items long.  Move onto the next step.

Go to the Google Keyword Tool located at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.   Start with the first idea on your list.  Type it into the box just below “Enter one keyword or phrase per line:”, type in the captcha image and click “Get keyword ideas”.  You will be given 2 lists of keywords.  The one titled “Keywords related to the term(s) entered” is the one we will focus on here.

Make the data usable – Okay, we have a list of keywords and data for those keywords.  We have to make the data usable for our needs. Here’s what you will do:

1)      Go to “match type” and change it from “broad” to “exact”.

2)      Go to “Choose columns to display” and hide “advertiser competition” and “local search volume.

3)      Still from “Choose columns to display” select “show average estimated CPC”

Now you have some information we can use.  We know about how many times each keyword is searched for every month and about how much Google charges its advertisers per click.

Download the data – At the bottom of the list (before the second table), you will find a small link that say “.csv (for excel)”.  Click that link and save the file.

Find the potential – Open your new excel file and create a simple formula that will multiply the global volume*cpc*0.005.  The easiest way is to create the formula for the first entry in the next column over, copy the formula and paste it down the list.  Label that column “potential”.  Next, sort all of your data by potential.

The reason that we multiply by 0.005 is because even if we are #1 in Google’s results, we will not get every visitor.  Besides that, the CPC is how much Google charges for the click.  We only get a percentage of that.  The Keyword Academy came up with a formula that would represent how much money we could expect to make every month off a keyword if we ranked #1 in Google for that keyword.  That formula basically boiled down to: search volume*CPC*0.005.

Research the competition – For this part, you will need two things, both are free:

1)      Mozilla Firefox http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

2)      SEO for firefox http://www.seobook.com/7068-12-656-custom.html

Once those are installed, it is time to look at your competition. I want you to only focus on keywords that have $50 a month or higher potential.  Pick out a keyword on your list, go to Google.com and look it up (remove the brackets that excel has around the keyword).  Thanks to SEO for firefox, each result has information under it that didn’t use to be there.  Near the beginning of that information should be “PR ?”.  Click the “?” on the top result and it will show you either a number, or a “-“.  That number is that site’s page rank.

Page rank is a number that is assigned to each website, and ranges from 0-10.  If there is dash there instead of a number it means that the site is either too new to have achieved a page rank, or that the rank was removed for some reason.  I want you to check out the first 4 results by looking at their PR.  If all 4 of those results are PR n/a, 0, 1, 2, or 3, highlight the keyword in green in your excel file.  If there is a page rank 4 in the results, but the EXACT keyword in NOT in the title, you can also mark it green.

If any of the top 4 results are a page rank 4 and the keyword is in the title, or if the PR of any of the top four are PR 5 or higher, mark that keyword red.  Go through this same exercise with each of the keywords on your list.  When you are done, you may or may not have a list of green keywords.  Either way, save that file and move on to the next keyword idea on your list.  The goal is to find an abundance of “green” keywords that you can later use to be the foundation of your first blog, as well as those that will follow it.

If this seems like a lot of work – it is.  There is a reason it’s called an internet business.  It is every bit a business and needs to be treated as such.  Later, you will find that this work will pay off in a huge way, but it will take time.

If you want to streamline this process, The Keyword Academy has a tool, available to its members, that will do most of the keyword research for you.  They do allow you to use it during the $1 trial, so if you have a dollar to invest, the tool will save you a bunch of time.  You can, however, do the research free.  It just tales a little more time.

Next I will show you how those green keywords will help you make money online.  There will be two articles that will address this topic:

1)      How to Set Up a Free Blogger Blog

2)      How to Set Up a Self Hosted WordPress Blog

Until then, go get some green keywords.

Related posts:

1. Earning Online for Free | Blogger Blogging
2. Keyword Research Basics
3. The Keyword Academy Review
4. Earning Online Blogging | Your First Real Post
5. Earning Online Cheap | Your Own Domain