Well, it’s true. It was a complex process. It took me almost two days to gather all the information. But no one ever say that making money online is easy. Although it’s very early to say, but looks like my research was worth it.

I wasn’t bother much about the traffic that I will get. The numbers gave me a good confidence that I will get relatively a nice amount of traffic.
What I am very interested is to find the correlation between the calculated numbers and the actual traffic volume.

I think I am going to start developing an application that will automate some of the data processing process. It will save me lots of time and definitely would make my work much more efficient.

Anyway stay tuned. In few weeks I am going to report back about my finding. And don’t be lazy. Do a good keyword research. It’s one of the key features toward your affiliate marketing success.

Google is offering one of the free keyword research tools that you can use. From my experience it’s a very useful tool. If you use it correctly you can extract a list of hundreds and thousands of keywords.
In this post I am not going to write a review about Google keyword tool but to show you how I use its output to try to predict which of the keywords will gain profit.
On top of it, I am going to investigate the correlation between Google “Average Search Volume” and the actual traffic that I am getting in order to try to calculate the potential profit for other projects.

A good keyword research will imply about the chances to drive cheep traffic to a website that was optimized for those keywords. A keyword research is always recommended for both organic and PPC traffic.

This post is focused on PPC. I will leave the organic issue to another post.

To make it simpler, let’s use an example. Suppose that I am doing a keywords research about the phrase “making money online”. Using the Google tool I can get lost of keywords. For each keyword I will get the “Estimated Avg. CPC” & the “Average Search Volume”.

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As you can see in the screenshot, we get a scale that implies about the amount of traffic that we will get. Google does not tell us the meaning of this value in terms of number of users. There is no real number that we can use in our calculations.
More than that, it doesn’t give us the option to compare between keywords or group of keywords.

My last sentence is not completely accurate. You can get some number that describes this scale. In order to do so you will need to export the output to a file. But again, what does this number means? When Google mentioning 0.03 next to a specified keyword, what doesn’t it mean?

At this point we will not try to understand its meaning in terms of number of users but I will show you how you can use this number to get some interesting information about your niche.

I use the same techniques to gather a list of almost 2000 keywords. For this list I extract the information using the Google tool. I exported the data to excel file.
Since it’s a long list of keywords I divided the keywords into categories (For each category I will create a separate landing page).

I summarized all the numbers, putting the keywords into two main categories: keywords with average CPC of $0.05 and keyword with average CPC bigger than $0.05.
For each category I also summarized the Average Search Volume. Below is my output.

(click on the image to enlarge)

As you can see, in most cases the percentage of traffic that you should get from the cheap keywords is bigger that the expensive keywords. Only one category has more traffic from the expensive keyword, but note to the fact that for this category the number of keyword is also the same.
This keywords table explains in a very clear way the long tail principle and the importance of good keyword research. If you use this kind of approach you know where to put your effort.

What you cannot deduce from this keywords table is the traffic volume in terms of users.
I am going to check those numbers and compare them to the actual traffic that I will get. Maybe I will find the coefficient to convert Google values to number of users.
Its not going to be easy and I would probably need lots of data before I will be able to come up with something. But it’s worth the try.

I will keep you posted with my finding.

However, I am sure that at least 50% of you are not familiar with another option of Google Keyword Tool. Not because it’s a hidden option, but mostly because we are get used to a way of work that we don’t look around us for something different.

In the main page of Google keywords tools there are two options. The default is what we most use: “Descriptive words or phrases”. The second option is: “Website content”. On the left side you will find a radio buttons with those two options.
Below you will find a screenshot of what you should look for:

Admit that some of you didn’t pay attention to it at all.

Choosing the second option allow you to enter a webpage URL to find keywords related to the content on the page. By doing so, literally as it sound, you will get a list of keywords that related to the webpage content. It’s a great way to expand your keywords list beyond what you have in your mind.

In most of the cases when I tell people about this option their faces looks like a combination of embarrassment and surprised. How I was with you?

With Wordtracker GTrends you enter the base keyword and in return you get a list of the top 100 keywords and the total number of times that a keyword has been looked up in the past 90 days using Wordtracker 300+ million keyword database. Unlike Wordtracker free suggestion tool, with Wordtracker GTrends you also get the option to check the trend for each keyword. This simple combination of data is very useful. Usually webmasters are arranging their keywords list and then looking for each keyword trends using other SEO tools. It’s defiantly save time and makes the keywords research task much simple and efficient.

Some time, especially with small niche, you will find the list satisfy for your needs. Wordtracker expose the total number of keywords in the list. If you would like to get the complete list you will have to subscribe to their service. Usually I would recommend starting with their free tools. Based on the limited results you can do a better decision whether a full subscription is worth for your needs.

In any case, do not skip the keyword research step before you start your SEO efforts or PPC campaign. Usually those who skip the keyword research step end up with no convertible traffic.