Bum Marketing Methods - Keyword Research

It would seem that there is some confusion on the next step to take once you have your niche market and a product to sell to that market.

Well the answer is Keyword Research. In laymans terms this is the practice of finding what terms your hungry market is placing into the search engines to find information and products relating to your niche.

Keyword Research will involve getting from a "broad term" to a "long tailed keyword" and to do this you will need some tools.

This article will explore the general aspects of this research and the tools needed to do it.

So lets start at the beginning and go with our general "Broad Term". Lets say for instance we have a product that is a DVD about how to find and fix swing faults in the golf swing. If we put "golf swing" into googles keyword research tool we get back a whole long list of words and terms that are related to "golf swing".

From here we can add these words to our original "Broad term" to create a "Long tail" keyword. Make sure this long term keyword makes sense and is something that a person searching for products like yours might enter into a search engine.

The reason for not using the general broad term is that there would be far too much competition for it and your chances of getting listed anywhere near the first page of results for that term would be extremely remote. If your not on the first page then your nowhere.

We now have our long tail keyword and we need to plug this into a google search to see how much competition it has. An ideal situation for this search would show results of 10,000 or less. If it does go with it, if it shows 65,000 then it's probably too competitive and you need to go back and repeat the above steps untill you hit the right  combination.

There are many different tools we can use for this type of research and good place to start is with Googles own Keyword tool, go to a search and enter keyword tools it will normally come up first. Also of assistance is the google wonder wheel, KW map, SEObook, google/trends to name just a few. All of the above tools will help with different aspects of your keyword research.

As you become more accomplished you may wish to  dig deeper but don't get caught in the trap of spending days on end with keyword research. You don't need to be perfect with the keywords, get into a general ball park area and you'll be fine running with that.