In this episode, we finally get to that keyword research summary that I have been promising.  We also sum up listener reaction to episode 056.  Big fun from Kuala Lumpur!  All this and more!

This Week Around Late Night IM

This episode was actually recorded in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  What a great trip.  As you can hear from the audio quality, recording in a hotel room is not great (but beats no recording at all).  I had awesome Dim Sum at a place called Din Tai Fung in KL.  It's my favorite place (they have locations throughout Asia.)

How To Do Niche Keyword Research (Part 1)

In the last several episodes, we've touched on several aspects of how to do keyword research, but they have all been in bits and pieces. In episode 049 I discussed some things to consider when dealing with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. In episode 053, we talked about finding Niche Keywords and in episode 054 we touched on Niche Keyword Competition. In this episode, I try to pull it all together for you in a way that hopefully will make some sense. When you are doing keyword research, you basically need to do three things

  • Understand what you are trying to accomplish
  • Figure out which what keywords are popular
  • Understand how hard it will be to rank for those keywords

How to do Keyword research

One note: A lot of times when I say “keyword” I really mean “keyword phrase”. It's the words that people type into Google when the are looking for something.

Increasingly, the search engine is not only Google, but also Bing/Yahoo and other engines as well. Another thing to note is that web search is not the only kind of search. Other really large search engines include YouTube and iTunes. Amazon is another one (but you don't have any control over that one really).

There is a very cool infographic on SearchEngineLand that gives a pretty good overview of keyword research. We can adapt that model for affiliate marketing and add to it to come up with a process for keyword research.

1. Determine Your Goal

Figure out what you are trying to do. What action do you want the searcher to take when he comes to your site from the search engine. This is called conversion. You want to “convert” a visitor into something else — a subscriber, a facebook fan, a customer, etc.

Usually with affiliate marketing you are trying get traffic to your site with the hope that the visitor will click a link and buy a product that you are promoting.

In the case of the corn sheller site I am ranking for several corn sheller related keyword phrases. One is buy corn sheller online. Clearly, my goal for that keyword (and most other keywords on that site) is for people to end up on eBay and make a purchase.

Another common example might be converting someone to your email list.

2. Brainstorm for keywords

You need to know what people are actually typing into the search engines. There are tools that can help you discover that, but it helps if you will start by imagining what you might type if you were the searcher.

  • Put yourself in the mind of the searcher
  • Consider the commercial intent of the keywords if appropriate
  • Put your list into the Google Keyword Tool
  • Think about the long tail.

Here is what SEOMoz has to say about the long tail…

It's wonderful to deal with keywords that have 5,000 searches a day, or even 500 searches a day, but in reality, these “popular” search terms actually make up less than 30% of the searches performed on the web. The remaining 70% lie in what's called the “long tail” of search. The long tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any given day, but, when taken together, they comprise the majority of the world's demand for information through search engines.

  1. Check keyword popularity
  2. Free keyword research tools
    • Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool
    • Google Insights for Search
    • Google Trends Keyword Demand Prediction
    • Microsoft Advertising Intelligence
    • Wordtracker’s Free Basic Keyword Demand
  3. Paid Keyword Tools

Don't assess keywords based on their traffic, assess them on their potential value.

Leave Us A Review In iTunes

Thanks so much for your reviews on iTunes. We get a ton of exposure from iTunes, and we really appreciate the reviews there. At last count, we were at 30 reviews and counting. Reviews help us get new listeners — so I really appreciate you taking the time to leave a review.

To leave a review, just go to latenightim.com/itunes and follow the instructions. Thanks!

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As always, I'd love to hear what you think about the podcast. Better yet, I’d love to answer your question about Internet marketing on the show. Just drop me a line here on the blog or on the digital recorder at 214-444-8655. Don’t worry, there are no stupid questions. Unless you tell me not to, when you ask a question or leave a comment might even use it on the show.

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Episode 057 Transcript

Hello and greetings from the incredibly awesome city of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. I’m coming to you from the 20th floor of the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Malaysia, close to the twin towers of Malaysia, the Kuala Lumpur KLCC, for a while they were the two largest towers in the world. I’m just blown away by Kuala Lumpur, it is more awesome than I ever could have possibly imagined. It’s kind of like a great combination of New York City and Shanghais and Hong Kong and Singapore all rolled up into one beautiful clean city with friendly people, very multicultural.

And, as you know is very important to me, lots of awesome food. It’s really great. My favorite dumpling place has a shop here, Din Tai Fung has a shop here with awesome dumplings. If you’re ever traveling around Asia, there’s one of these places in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Taiwan, which is where they from in Taipai, and in Shanghai, and then I think I just heard that they opened up a shop in LA; highly recommended.

So I’m having a great time in Kuala Lumpur. I went to the largest Mosque and I went to a Malaysian cultural history Museum this morning, which was awesome as well. I’m having an absolutely great trip.

I have some extra time on this trip because I happened to be in Malaysia on Labor Day, so the company I work for our plants are shut down and the administrative side of things is shut down, so I’m kind of stuck in the hotel looking for stuff to do. I have business meetings tonight, but today I had a little extra time to do some stuff and that’s what I’m doing.

In this episode we’re going to talk about keyword research. But, before we do that I wanted to say thank you to all of those who responded to Episode 56, I got some really great and encouraging feedback. I’ve said this so many times, but you know why I do the show, you guys are why I do the show. I got just such fantastically awesome feedback from everybody about things they liked about the show, and it was just overwhelmingly positive. So don’t expect major changes.

I am, however, going to engage this pro company that does radio spots and other professional audio for podcasters, it’s called Music Radio Creative. It’s a shop out of Great Britain, the guy’s name is Mike and he’s pretty famous in the world of radio, he’s a professional radio guy who now has his own business doing audio for radio spots, podcasters, and TV stations. He’s going to take a look at the intro and outro for the show and maybe there will be something a little better that comes out of that, but we will keep the theme song as part of the branding. For those of you who are passionate about the theme song, like I am, don’t worry.

Transcript continued from the Episode 057 Show notes

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