The Keyword Academy Review

This is the first in a series of product reviews that will hopefully allow you to find the tools you need for your internet business.  If you would like to submit a product review article, please go to this page first. – > Write for IBG

As the title states, this will be my personal review of The Keyword Academy (TKA).

History

TKA is a program that was started by Courtney Tuttle and Mark Butler.  Mark and Court first started working together to teach people how to make money online in 2007 at Court’s Internet Marketing School.  In late 2008 they opened The Keyword Academy.  In April of 2009 they went “Pro”, charging a monthly fee for membership to their program that included step by step instructional videos, and a forum. (Mark and Court, feel free to correct me if I get any of the details wrong).

I joined TKA in September of 2009 after hearing about it from Grizzly at How to Make Money Online for Beginners.  I had been doing mostly MLM and affiliate marketing since 2003, but I was anxious to get out of the MLM scene.  I started reading Grizzly’s guides and set up a couple of blogs for free using blogger.  When it became obvious that this was something that really can work, I chose to join TKA and use their methods to up my game.  Here it is, nine months later, and I am still a member.  In fact, every penny that I make online right now, I attribute to their methods.

So what do they offer?  They basically teach you how to properly set up an internet business based on finding profitable keywords, building websites around those keywords, getting them ranked in the search engines, so that you get traffic to them, and monetizing them.  That sounds a lot like this site, right?  It also sounds like a lot of other sites out there.  This is not a new philosophy.  There are some differences though.

Keyword Research

TKA has a slightly different approach to keyword research than most other programs.  It is the same method that I teach in my keyword research post.  TKA turns it up a notch though. You start by going to the Google keyword tool, as usual, but then you take your list of keywords and download them into a csv file.  Normally, you would take that file, do the formulas to determine the profitability of each keyword and then start looking up the keywords one by one to gauge the competition.

Looking up every keyword on a list of 100 keywords can take an afternoon.  TKA decided to give its members a tool to do this for them.  Now you just get the csv file from the keyword tool and upload it into the “Niche Refinery”.  Come back in 5-20 minutes and it will have all of the potential for all of the keywords rated for you.  They will even be rated on a scale of 1-1000 for difficulty.  You just saved an afternoon worth of keyword research.

I currently have 2131 keywords in niche refinery that are considered “green” (meaning they are worth money and can be ranked for without insane difficulty).  My total revenue potential for those keywords is $351,920.85 a month.

There is even a program member who has created a tool that does the Google keyword tool work for you.  With these tools, you could find 2000 green keywords in a couple of hours I am sure.

Site Building

As with every other part of the program, they show you how to build a site correctly, step by step.  When I say “step by step”, I mean they explain it to you while you are watching them do it on the video.  They show you how to set up wordpress, how to set up the plugins, how to add content – everything.  Seeing them do it keeps you from making a ton of mistakes that could really hurt your business.

SEO

This is the one area where you cannot skimp if you plan on earning money online.  It is also one of the hardest concepts for most people to understand.  You will learn about keyword density, what matters and what does not (you will be surprised), and how to properly SEO your site onsite and offsite.

Offsite SEO is the most important aspect of getting traffic to your site.  Offsite SEO primarily consists of getting the right links, properly formatted to your site.  Not only that, but the right amount.  It turns out that timing is everything.  Too many links pointing to your site too quickly when it is new, and you are in the sandbox.  Use the same anchor too many times and you are “Google bombing”.  TKA will teach you how to do it right.

Backlink Tools

You cannot get to the top of the search engines by submitting articles to the top 10 article directories alone.  Not even the top 100.  The more links you get from any one source, the less value those links have.  You constantly need new places to post articles and get links.

TKA has a guest posting system where you can choose to submit posts to over 700 member blogs.  These are not just PR0 garbage sites that nobody cares about.  These are actually real sites that the members own, build links to, and care about.  I personally use the service, and have posted over 62,000 words worth of content to it.  Every article gives me 2 backlinks.  The best part is that I can choose to post to the places I want.  If I have a home improvement article that points links to my home improvement site, I will post an article to one of the home improvement blogs on the system.  Relevant, in content, anchored backlinks – it does not get much better.

There is even a yahoo groups group that is strictly for TKA members, where you can send out messages to the group looking for link exchanges.  I have received hundreds of links to my sites using this service.

Webinars

TKA has weekly Q&A webinars and monthly content webinars.  I have never actually attended a Q&A webinar, so I cannot tell you too much about them, but I attend a lot of the content webinars. They vary in content from how to build a profitable hub at hubpages.com, to how to build a $5k a month supersite, to how to do proper internal link building to build authority to your sub-pages, etc.  They are usually about an hour and a half long or so and I always learn something new from them.

Forums

There is also a TKA member forum that is just crazy full of useful advice, tips, etc.  There are so many people on that forum that know exactly what they are doing and are very helpful.  There are other internet marking forums around.  The difference is that this one is members only.  That keeps out a lot of the riffraff, and helps keep the forum real.  The other cool thing is that TKA has a system by where each member can choose to show a badge that lets you know how much money that person makes.  In order to get a $ badge, you need to “put your money where your mouth is” and show proof of those earnings.  If you ask a question and get an answer from a member with a $5000 badge (or better yet, a smiley face), you know it’s good advice.

The Bad

You knew there would have to be something bad about TKA, right?  If you look closely, you can find downers about just about anything.  Here are some of them.

First of all, I think they downplay the potential of the program on their sales page.  They say something to the effect of if you work hard at it for a year, you can get to $1000 a month.  It’s hard to sell someone on that, especially in this “I want $ now” business.  I understand that they want to keep away from the hype, but is it hype to say that you can potentially make $5000 a month in a year and grow to a full six-figure income within two if it is true?  I would love to see them talk more about the potential here.

The info is out there.  You can find most of the information out there on the internet somewhere.  The strength in TKA is not that the concepts are revolutionary, but that they are all in the same place.  Usually you need to sift through the good and the bad and try to figure out which is which.  In TKA, you get the good and none of the bad.  Still, the information is out there.

It is not for everyone. What TKA teaches is not for everyone.  Many people do not have the patience or the work ethic to succeed in this game, and this takes both.  If you think you are going to sign up for the program and get rich in a month or two, it is not going to happen.  You will need to work hard to get anywhere.  It’s a lot better than working for someone else though, in my opinion.

The Verdict

Personally, I think that the core videos, forum, and the webinars alone are worth the membership fee.  In fact, that is pretty much all they had when I joined.  If you add the niche refinery and the guest posting system, it becomes a no-brainer.  Not sure?  They will give you a membership to their program for 30 days for only $1 to try it out.  If you don’t like it, you simply cancel your paypal subscription and walk away.  This is not a watered down version of the program, you get access to it all, the core videos, webinars, forum, niche refinery, guest post system – the whole ball of wax, for 30 days for $1.

Are you ready to go check it out?

Go Here

Honestly, there are not many tools that I use outside of TKA, but there are a couple.  I will review those later.  In the mean time, if you want to learn everything you need to know about starting your own internet business, go check out the Keyword Academy.

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