How to Earn Money Online – Keyword Research Part 1

How to earn money online? Well, hopefully that’s why you’re reading this blog. You might read this entire post or you might skim and go to another page. If you leave with nothing, please at least leave with this piece of information: make sure you choose a keyword that is going to pay you for all your effort.

Choosing the correct keyword is the foundation and starting point for any person who wants to earn money online by blogging.

Before I get started, I want to reiterate that this blog is dedicated to those that are tired of buying useless information and want to learn how to earn money for free. That’s right, I’m not going to write a crappy post and then direct you to an e-mail subscription list or tell you to buy the newest money making product on the market. I’m going to share everything that’ I’ve learned so you won’t have to waste your hard earned money to buy useless drivel.

Now, there are many ways to earn a buck or two online, but this site is directed towards those who want to earn money with Google Adsense or want to rank high in the Google Search Engine. Ranking high in the search engines (SERPS) is the best way to earn residual income as people are coming to your website, instead of you pushing people to go to your website. However, the only way people will go to your website using Google is:

1. Your page must be on the first page of the SERPS

2. Many people need to be searching for your keyword on a daily basis

An organic search is where someone finds your website through a search engine using a keyword. This is what we want to focus on because there are many benefits in getting visits from organic searches. Some of the benefits are:

1. You won’t have to pay for Google Adwords to be on the first page of Google

2. Your keyword will be (or should be) targeted towards a “buying” market (we’ll get into this)

3. In the long run, it’s less time consuming (low maintenance) once your website is up and running and ranked high in the SERPS

Ok, I think I beat the hell out of that. Now onto actually choosing a keyword word. Like I said before, choosing a keyword will make or break you. You could spend months or even years on a blog and realize later on that you’re not getting paid because you chose the wrong keyword. You can avoid all of this if you do the research up front. The keyword is like a “seed” in which you will grow a money making site.

Many websites, web gurus and earn money blogs tell you that you need to choose a good keyword…the only problem is, the never tell you HOW. And if they do, it’s usually something you will need to sign up for. Now, I don’t want to give away my niches, but I will show you (for free) what keywords you should avoid (and why). Also, I will perform an exercise and show you how to choose keywords and what types of free tools you can use in order to find these keywords.

First off, let’s do an exercise on what keywords you should stay away from and why. Even as a newbie, I’ve been around long enough to know what keywords many bloggers go after. When looking for a good keyword you will need to look for the following:

1. How much daily traffic does the keyword receive?

The keyword should have a lot of daily searches. The reason being that earning money with Adsense is a numbers game. The more people going to your website, the more chances of your ads getting clicked on. This is also the same for affiliate products.

2. Does the keyword pay well?

You will want to find a keyword that has a high adsense cost per click (CPC). Adsense tends to pay around 15-25% for ads that are perfectly optimized and not smart priced. The higher the CPC the higher the chance you will have of getting more money per click. However, high CPC is not everything as you need to follow rule #1 as well. If there’s a $30 CPC for the term “dog lawyer” (I’m making this up) and 10 daily searches, you’re not going to get as much as a $5 CPC with 300 daily searches. It’s crappy example, but you get the picture, right? On the other hand, don’t pick a keyword with a low CPC. Even if you think it’s a great niche, it’s pointless as you will be getting peanuts compared to someone that picked a higher paying keyword with the same amount of traffic.

3. What is the click through rate (CTR)?

“A CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions)”

Most blogs get about a 1-2% CTR. When doing your research, you will want to make sure that your keyword has at least a 1% click through rate. Getting 0% CTR is no good for obvious reasons.

4. Competition

This is probably the most important aspect of finding a good keyword. Even if all of the other factors are good, if your competiton is very stiff, then it might take years before you start making any money. You will want to focus on niche keywords that have less competition. I define competition as the top 10 pages on Google. To determine competition, you will need to know the following:

Does the owner of the website know SEO (Is it optimized?) – We will get into this later in the post.
How many backlinks does the site have? (I will define backlinks below)
Where are the backlinks coming from? Are the sites related? Is the link in the post or article?
Are the links anchored with the right keyword? (I will specifically talk about “anchored links” in another post)
Are the links coming from high PR websites?

Sorry this post is getting too long, I will start up where I left off in my next post about how to earn money online.