Exceptional Keyword research tips to help increase Affiliate Sales!

Today, we have some actionable keyword research tips from Jake, Brand Manager for Long Tail Pro. He’s an expert in Keyword research and inbound marketing so it’s a huge pleasure to have him share some powerful points with us that are confirmed to help us generate more income with Affiliate Marketing. If you want tips on SEO for newbies, you are going to like this post

Jake is not only here to talk about keyword stuff. He’s also got a special gift for you my readers. I’m a firm user of Long Tail Pro so I highly recommend you check it out now that its Brand Manager is here with a special discount. 

Now, over to you Jake!

As a reader of Enstine’s blog, you already know that affiliate marketing is a viable way to make money online.

If you aren’t familiar, the idea is that you can recommend products on your website and then get paid a commission based on any sales that you refer for that product. This comes in many different forms, but one of the most commonly used affiliate programs is the Amazon Associates Program. Amazon is the king of online retailers, and they sell just about everything.

Being part of their affiliate program means that you could have a website all about toaster ovens and then review your favorite brands, and get paid a commission from Amazon for any sales you generate through your links.

This is a short summary of the affiliate process, but today we’re going to focus on the steps you need to take to get to that point.

After all, if nobody comes to your website all about toaster ovens, you’re definitely not going to be making any affiliate commissions.

Keyword research is the process you can go through to determine if your product or your niche is something that you can rank highly in Google for.

Why Keyword Research?

There are a couple of reasons that starting with solid keyword research is a logical first step in trying to increase your traffic and start making affiliate income.

1. You want to make sure enough people are searching for your item(s). If the product or service you want to be an affiliate of is not popular enough, you may be limiting how much you can make before you’ve even started. Perhaps only 30 people per month are searching for the product in Google.That is a very small pie to start with.Ideally, you want something that is searched thousands of times per month and is something you can compete for (more about analyzing competition later).
2. Ideally, you want to see a lot of advertisers for the product or type of product that you want to sell. The idea here is that the more people who are advertising for that search term, the more products you’ll be able to advertise and be an affiliate of on your website.

   So you want to make sure there is some “commercial intent” for your topic, so they have associated products to purchase. Clearly in our example, if you did a site that contains everything you need to know about toaster ovens, you could be an affiliate of the ovens themselves as well as some other related products like recipe books and other kitchen accessories.

Focus on Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords (The Low Hanging Fruit of SEO) are more specific search queries, which generally get searched less often and in turn, have less competition. Long tail keywords are a great place to start when you want to launch an affiliate marketing business.

In the toaster oven example, “toaster ovens” would be a generic, “short tail” keyword that you would have trouble ranking highly in Google for. However, “Best toaster oven under $100” is an example of a long tail keyword that will likely be something you could rank for.

The idea is that if you build a page on your website that is titled “Our Best Toaster Ovens Under $100” and then write some in-depth reviews of those products and create a helpful buyers guide, you’ll rank better in Google because you are specifically addressing the question of the searcher.

When getting started, I’d suggest using a keyword research tool to find a list of 20 or so long tail keywords that get searched frequently enough (over 1,000 times per month) and have beatable competition. This will give you a great kick start for your affiliate marketing site.

Beating Your Competition!

I mentioned the importance of analyzing your competition earlier, so let’s talk more about that. Here are some key things to look for when you are analyzing the top 10 results in Google:

• Do the results have the keyword in the page title, page description, and URL?
• What are the metrics like Domain Authority and Page Authority (from Moz)?
• How many links are pointing to that website and to this page in particular?

Once you’ve answered these 3 questions, you’ll have a good idea of how likely you are to break into the top 10 for that keyword. After all, the top 2 results get about 50% of the clicks.

Ideally, you’ll find at least a couple of sites in the top 10 that don’t have the exact keyword in the page title or description. This means that those pages probably aren’t truly focused on this keyword. It’s also great to find Domain and Page Authority in the 20’s or even lower, which means that the site isn’t super authoritative.

Finally, you’re looking for pages that have very few or even zero backlinks pointing to them. This is still an important indicator for Google’s ranking algorithm, particularly the quality of those links – not the quantity. However, if a page doesn’t have even one link from another site, this is typically a good sign for you!

Get Started Today!

Keyword research is a critical component of your affiliate marketing efforts, so the sooner you start finding the best keywords, the sooner you can start making some money.

Long Tail Pro makes the process of finding keywords and analyzing your competition both quick and simple, so you don’t waste valuable time. We’ve set up a deal just for Enstine’s readers that will get you $20 off of Long Tail Pro when you click this link.

The offer will only be open for 72 hours, so click here to get the discount.

For more information about keyword research and related topics, come visit us at the Long Tail Pro blog. We hope to see you soon!

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Hey Jake thanks for this beautiful post and most especially for the discount you offer my readers 😉  Long Tail Pro is one of the Best Keyword Research tools I’ve seen for Content Marketers and Bloggers. I’m sure they will jump on this offer.

I just want to add a little more how this super exciting keyword tool helps me locate long tail keywords that get 1000s of local monthly search.

Now, the Apply Filters facility adds huge value to this exceptional keyword and competition analysis tool. It helps save time and takes you straight to what you want.

We’ve learned from Jake’s expertise above what long tail keywords are. So basically, with Long Tail Pro, you are able to return just keywords that have reasonable local search volume (at least 1000 in the image above)

Another very exciting option you discover above is the ability to exclude short keywords. In this example, if the keyword has less than 3 words, the SEO software will automatically remove it from the list.

So this desktop SEO tool can help you discover money making long tail keywords in no time. It’s a huge time saver for Internet Marketers and Bloggers.

Keyword Research with Long Tail Pro – Simple Case Study.

Here is exactly how this keyword research tool can help you discover an interesting hot market. With this, you able able to create niche blogs promoting amazon products and of course, it’s needless to say here that if well done, you will generate sales.

Let’s  find out what is going on in the Combat Knives niche. That is actually our seed keyword.

It’s very simple to go about this in Long Tail Pro. first, let us create a campaign.

In this first phase, you already lay a solid foundation for your campaign. Note that the campaign name ‘combat’ does not represent the keywords. That’s just the name I gave the campaign.

Now, we have to add more ingredients and tell the software what we want. So let’s entered the seed keyword (mentioned above) and click ‘Add’

Note that this desktop keyword tool allows you to enter multiple seed keywords in a single campaign!

In this case study, we will not ‘Fetch Additional Data’ These are however more incredible options to get specific data like domain name availability, global search volume, Google Title Competition, etc

There are a couple of things to note in this image;

138 keywords were found. 133 were filtered out and only 5 long tail keywords were returned. Now, Col Steel Knives got my attention with up to 9900 local searches per month and low competition.

Let’s do some competitor analysis by clicking the keyword. This will analyze the entries on Google page #1 for this keywords.

Here we have 7 entries that are on page #1 of Google for the chosen keyword. 3 of these entries are targeting the exact keyword as you find it in their titles.

Long Tail Pro does not end here. We are still able to analyze further to determine the strength of these competitors but let’s find out from Amazon if there are products to promote.

Definitely, it’s a promising niche so you may want to start creating a niche blog right now 😉

Grab your copy of Long Tail Pro and experience the keyword research process. Play around the options and filters to get more accurate results.

This may not be the best though! It’s just a simple case study to spark your brains to what this tool can help you achieve.

All you will need is just a seed keyword to begin with. The rest will be developed and delivered to you on a golden plate.

Jake has done an awesome job in this post so let me here what you think about it. Share your thoughts in the comment box and don’t fail to grab your discounted copy of Long Tail Pro. You have just 72 hours!