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Effective Keyword Research For Profitable Blogging
Can you make money from blogging?
Of course, if you choose profitable keywords to blog about. In effective keyword research part 1 I discussed in detail with pictorial illustrations how to find hundreds of related profitable keywords.
Judging by the number of searches the keywords get per month verse the number of pages currently existing for those keywords.
But those information alone doesn't guarantee you will make money from your topic.
To blog for and to profit, you need to do one more research.
Blog for Profit
Those two factors alone doesn't determine blog profitability.
Actually there are 4 factors that determines whether or not you will blog to profit. And they are:
- Your knowledge and experience of your chosen topic.
- The number of Monthly Searches your site concept keyword and related keywords gets.
- The number of pages online already targeting those keywords at the search engines.
- Whether or not your keywords can be monetized in several ways. Is your keyword profitable with several monetization options?.
The first factor is determined by you.
The second and third factors has been discussed in how to do keyword research part 1.
And the last factor is what this article wants to discuss.
Profitable Blogging - Major ways Blogs can be Monetized
You don't want to sweat to create a blog with great content and traffic only to realize you can't make money from it, because the keywords are poor with the major monetization options.
So before starting a blog one of the first things to do is to find out through effective research if your possible site topic will be profitable with the monetization options you have in mind.
There are several ways to make money from blog, the common ones are:
Pay Per Click ads such as Google Adsense
Affiliate marketing, selling other people's product (s)
Selling your own product (s) on your blog
Offer a paid service
Ask readers to make a Donation
Sell Ads space on your blog
Accept paid reviews and more
Effective Keyword Research - Finding out if your primary keywords can make you money
Can you make money blogging? Can you blog for profit?
Plan to blog to profit before even setting up a blog. This is how...
First determine the major way or the primary way you will like to make money from your blog.
Where will your primary blog income come from?
Is it from ads you'll display on your blog, through selling other people's products related to your topic, selling your own product, or writing reviews for people?
When you know how you will want to make money from your blog then you can do a simple search to see if the topic you're considering for your blog will be profitable in those areas.
Checking keyword profitability for Google Adsense
One of the easiest ways to monetize a site with good amount of traffic is to display pay per click ads (best being Google adsense) on the site.
Google Adsense is an advertising program introduced by Google where you apply for ads related to your site content to be displayed on your site.
When someone click's on any of the ads, Google pays you some fraction of the cost per click advertisers paid them for the ads.
If you followed my suggestion in the first part of this article to add the Estimated CPC to your keyword research data when using Google Adwords Keyword tool, then you would already know how much CPC each keyword carries.
No one is sure how much percentage of the CPC Google pays site owners but it's a small fraction. The higher the CPC value the more money you will be paid per click.
So it's better if your specific keyword and it related keywords carry a CPC of $2 and above. But it must not be less than $1.
If most of your keywords carry a CPC of $1 or less, it simply means that it would require a very large number of traffic for you to make good money from adsense.
When should you keep a keyword with Less than a Dollar CPC?
If most of the related keywords for your topic have less than $1 CPC and you're not interested in Adense then it shouldn't bother you. But if you are, it's better you pick another topic/keyword.
In truth, not all of your related keywords will be profitable with adsense.
If you have some few keywords with low CPC but some good number with high CPC then you can keep the keyword. And when it's time to monetize your blog only add adsense to the pages with good CPC.
Google adsense is easy money when you really have good traffic. You don't have to do anything or promote it to make money. So it's a good monetization option that you seriously want to consider.
Research for Affiliate Products
Affiliate marketing (generating leads to other people's product) is one of the best ways to monetize a site.
It works very easy when you write valuable content and then use in-context link (text link within the body of posts) to recommend and direct readers to products that will be valuable to them concerning the topic you have discussed.
As long as your article is really helpful, readers will appreciate the recommendation and gladly click through. And possibly make a purchase which will become an immediate income for you.
If you are interested in making money from affiliate products then do some research to see if there are products related to your topic that you can recommend to readers.
Go to Clickbank.com and sign up for an account. They don't accept some countries though, like Nigeria and perhaps others.
There are other networks such as Cj.com that you can use too.
Go to their product market place and enter the specific keyword for your topic and click Search.
If there are products related to your keyword it will display them and you can then peruse them and see if you find any that interests you.
If you do, click on it to visit the merchant's site. Study the site.
Does it convince you to want to make a purchase? What was your first impression of the site?
If you are impressed and you personally like the product then click on the sign up button and note the URL in your list beside that keyword.
Continue to search for more products using related keywords.
Spy on your Competitors to find more related Products, Keywords and Content Ideas
Go to Google and type in your keyword with quotes. Top ten sites will be displayed. Click to visit each site. When you are there, study the site.
Click on recommendation links within articles or banners.
Your goal is to find related products to that keyword that interests you.
Another benefit of doing this is that you will also find keywords you never thought of and content ideas too (DO NOT COPY).
Just read through the site. You might find a topic that you think you can write better on. Or that gives you a totally different idea for content.
You might also find new keywords that you never thought of. If you think you can write on it, run it through your keyword research tool. Find it demand and competition.
You also want to see if his/her recommendations interests you enough to recommend it in future to your own readers.
Whenever you find any interesting product and ideas, note them down.
You are likely going to find other monetization models that you never thought of.
The structure of competitors site could also give you idea on how to structure yours. But like I said before, DO NOT COPY. Only use their work as inspiration.
Other Places you can use to find related Products and Keywords
Amazon
eBay
We'll discuss the several ways to make money from blogging in detail in future articles.
The purpose of this article is for you to be sure that your topic keywords can be monetized in some good ways before setting up a blog, so that you're sure of a profitable blogging.
There are some keywords that can be monetized endlessly while others are limiting.
You just need to make sure you have at least three strong ways to monetize your blog.
Effective Keyword Research - Conclusion
Now that you have all this information, what do you do with them?
In part 1 I suggested you note down 3 possible topics you can blog about and do a detailed keyword research on all of them.
The essence is so you can compare all three topics later to choose the most profitable topic using the four factors above.
Effective keyword research can be very tiring. Using a good keyword tool helps greatly to reduce the amount of time spent on researching. And provides a lot of keywords and information about those keywords to enable you choose the most profitable keywords.
It's better to spend 3 months researching on profitable keywords and blog profitably than to rush and start a blog only to realize later that you've wasted your time.
Oh, did I say effective keyword research conclusion? Sorry there's nothing like that because you keep researching for profitable keywords you can write about in your day to day blogging activities.
Keep adjusting and improving your keyword list everyday. Remove any one you think will be less profitable and add more profitable ones.
When I said conclusion, I meant we are concluding the major research involved in choosing a blog topic.
In part 1 you'll see I did research on three keywords but settled for "Blogging" because first, I have had a good experience with it and so can provide detailed helpful articles.
Secondly, the Demand is high.
Thirdly though the primary keyword "Blogging" is very competitive it has some related keywords that have low competition that I can target to rank for at the search engines to get good traffic; Even though I never get to rank for "Blogging".
For example as at writing this post, this website is already on page 2 of Google for the keyword "Blogging for Beginners" with and without the quotes (fluctuates between page 2 and 3).
And that keyword can also be said to be my primary keyword since that's my target audience.
And lastly there are endless profitable ways to monetize the topic "Blogging". I ruled out the other keywords almost immediately I started my effective keyword research because they were narrow in depth and poor with monetization.
So analyze your data and make a decision on the most profitable topic to blog about.
Blogging for profit is less difficult and most profitable when you plan well for it before starting.
Set goals and keep them in mind in your day to day blogging.
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