Perhaps the most important step is making money on WordWolf is the first. Keyword selection is key and if you don't do it right you just end up wasting your time. There are two major concerns when we do keyword selection:
Concern 1: CPC (cost per click) - You don't want to be writing articles that no one is going to want to advertise on otherwise you will end up making tiny amounts of money even when people do click on the ads. You can see the CPC of a keyword using a keyword tool. Generally we are looking for words with a CPC of $4 or more, because the general consensus is that Google will pay you 25% of what they charge advertisers. Does this mean you should never target lower paying keywords? No, but you need to know what you're getting into.
Concern 2: Competition - When selecting a keyword you don't want to end up going head to head with CNN.com, because you'll lose. There are a TON of sites on the web that Google trusts a lot and we'd like to avoid them as much as possible.
Ok, so now that we know what were looking for let's develop a process to help you find winning keywords.
Step 1: First you need to think of what general niche you want to target. Just to get you started here are a few good ones: investing, banking, loans, mortgages, laywers, insurance, credit cards, and surgery.
Step 2: Narrow it down by finding a two or three word combination that you want to target. This should still be a fairly generic term that gets searched for a lot. An example would be "home loans" or "bad credit mortgages".
Step 3: Search for your word using the keyword tool. Change the "match type" from "broad" to "exact", hide "global search volume" and "advertiser competition", and show "estimated avg. CPC". If the CPC of the words isn’t around or above $4 then I toss it right away, otherwise go to the bottom of the first list and click ".csv (for excel)" to download the list.
Step 4: Open the excel file and trim your list down a little by eliminating any keywords that are searched for over 1000 times a month, or less than 200 times a month. This gives us a sweet spot of words that are not too competitive, but are still searched for.
**Repeat this process until you have a list of 200-300 words**
Step 5: Check out the competition for your words by downloading an SEO toolbar that will show PR (page rank) in search results. I like SEO Quake. Now go to google.com (NOT .ca, .co.uk, or any country specific google) and search for your word, now we need to figure out which words are worth going after and which are not. This is where the process becomes more of an art and less of a science but here are some factors:
- Toss out any keywords where any of the top 3 results are higher than PR3.
- Toss out any keywords where any of the top 3 results that are PR3 contain your exact keyword in their title
- If there is an article directory, squidoo, or hubpages type page in the top 3 I'll sometimes be a little lax on the other two rules
Going through your list of 200-300 words you'll likely end up with 10 through 30 words that are winners. If you end up with a lot more you probably were too easy in your screening (or you may have just found an easy keyword).
It will take you some time to get good at keyword selection but once you are good then you will have the world of MMO opened up to you. Best of luck and read on to the next article about writing articles (Part 2) for the best methods there.
