Keyword Research - Amazon Affiliate

The first step in this whole process is the keyword research phase. Without properly researched keywords you're entire venture will fall flat on its face, you'll get frustrated and give up calling the whole 'make money online' thing a scam. So. Lets get this right eh :)

For our keyword research were going to use a tool that Google makes available for free called, interestingly enough, the Keyword Tool. Our goal using this tool is to come up with a nice list of keywords that we can potentially build profitable websites around. In this phase we're not going for the one golden keyword, we're just compiling a big list of keywords that we'll qualify in the next few lessons.

Ok so we need to start brainstorming ideas to plug into the keyword tool. I like to go to eBay's categories to get ideas of niches that I can research because they cover just about every tangible product. So head over to eBay and plug in one of the categories.



I decided to go with "water sports" so I pasted that into the search field, entered the captcha and clicked on "get keyword ideas". Then it brings up a big table of data. I wont go into everything about the tool here, we just need to focus on a few things. Set your match type to "exact" and in the "choose columns to display" drop down menu make sure you're showing local searches and trends. Now sort the table by local searches from most to least.



Before we dig into these numbers we need to set some parameters to look for so were not completely lost and we can start building list of keywords that have an adequate amount of searches and hopefully an upward trend. I make sure the keywords I choose have at least 1000 searches (per month) and there are at least 3 words in the phrase.

We go with at least 1000 searches per month because any less than that simply wouldn't be worth it. You need enough people coming to your site so that you can make regular sales. We want to go with at least 3 words in the phrase because the longer key phrases will have less competition than one or two word keywords.

After doing a search for "water sports" and sorting by local, exact searches I only have 2 keywords over 1000 searches per month. "water sports" gets 27,100 searches which is a ton. I'm going to just pass on that because I know the competition will be very tough for that phrase because of the search count and the fact that's its only 2 words. However the second phrase "water sports equipment" has a lot more potential. with 1600 searches and 3 words it fits our parameters perfectly.

One more thing to look at is the trend. It looks like this keyword hits its peak in the summer which makes sense:) If you were looking to make quick sales this might not be the keyword for you but I'm going to keep it because it would be a good keyword to develop a site around in preparation for next summer. It will give me time to get it built up. I'm going to copy that and paste it into a spreadsheet for future research.

Now its just rinse and repeat. After you've compiled at least 20 keywords that fit those parameters go ahead and move on to the next lesson.

Thrive Learning Institute - "Show more options" tab

Recently Google has come out with a little tab that you can click on with the text "show more options" and at Thrive Learning Institute having multiple options is paramount. When you click on this link you'll see a side bar pop up to the left side of the screen that has a few different options.

One of my favorite options is the Wonder wheel. This is a great tool to use for brainstorming keywords and topics to write about for a blog, to create a niche website around and to analyze competition. When you click on the wonder wheel option a wheel will appear in the middle of the screen that contains your keyword and then on a number of spokes coming out of the main wheel there will be related more long-tail keywords connected to it. This is great because you can see variations of the keyword you may not have thought of before.

Additionally you can click on one of the related terms and that will then become the main wheel and you can see terms related to that one. So you can "drill down" as many in the internet marketing world say and find unique little niches that you can exploit and profit from.

A few other features in this side par that i really like are the forums link and the videos link. If you need to find some forums to get involved in with your niche all you need to do is type in your keyword come tot he "show more options" tab and click on "forums" and a list of all the forums talking about your niche will come up. This a great way to get involved in your community fast and easy.

The Video link is also good because generally there will be less competition for videos than for text and many times you'll be able to find keywords that don't have ANY videos indexed for it. You can then quickly whip out some videos and get ranking highly for your keyword with those videos and start driving traffic to your website. There are more options on the "show more options" tab but I'll let you explore those for yourself ;)

Read more from Thrive Learning Institute to get yourself a better understanding of our philosophy and how to make money online.