Using Keywords for your Online Businesses
Okay so I went right in and enrolled in Courtney Tuttle’s and Mark Butler’s internet marketing crash course at The Keyword Academy. It is actually the second time I enrolled because the first time I did, I was not able to follow through and had to unsubscribe from its $1 crash course one month trial. Boy do I regret that now.
The course is exactly what I have been looking for all this time but I was just to stubborn to submit to a structured learning system that the course offers because I thought all what I needed to do is experiment on my own and try to create my own system. But now I know how difficult it is to do that as most of the time you are lost trying to figure out what to do next which will cost you more time because you are doing absolutely nothing that will benefit your business most of the time.
I guess that is the very first thing that you need to understand with this racket. Internet marketing is a business and as such, it must be approached exactly like a business. You have to invest the time and the money (if you can) to achieve the business goals at the shortest possible time using the appropriate strategies. If you are doing nothing but wonder what to do next most of the time, reading other people’s blogs, hanging around in forums, watching your site stats get that trickle of traffic, waiting for affiliate sales or Adsense clicks, then you are absolutely wasting your time and letting precious money slip out of your hands. Even in online businesses, time is money and once you lose time, you will never get it back.
If you don’t find yourself doing keyword research, writing articles (if you do not outource them yet) and getting SEO backlinks most of the friggin’ time, you are letting time pass by and that means you are not getting closer to your goals. Let’s admit it, we are doing this for the money that will give us that early retirement and the opportunity to improve our way of life and be able to do what we’ve always wanted to do. To achieve this, you have to be willing to put in all the work and that does not mean commenting on other people’s blogs to get backlinks (more on this in the future).
The Keyword Academy Crash Course
If you wish to make significant headway and start making money on the internet at the fastest possible time, you absolutely need to be working with keywords. We all know this is dogma in this business but very few of us are actually doing it right. Court and Mark over at TKA is teaching thousands of their students how to do it right with their brilliant 10-part video course and the best thing about it is it is just 1 dollar for one whole month!!!
I don’t like to appear like I am pushing the course too hard (it does have an affiliate program) but I would be remiss in my self-appointed mission to pay it forward if I didn’t. If you are really serious in making money online and in becoming a full-fledged, no-nonsense internet marketer but are still lost in the maze of one $47 e-book after another, I urge you to fork out that 1 dollar to learn all you need to know about using keywords for your online businesses.
How I am doing with the course
I am currently doing the nitty gritty on the first two parts of the course which involves coming up with a keyword list using appropriate keyword research tools and establishing which of those keywords are doable in the competition sense. We all need to do research about the keywords that are applicable to the niches we are looking to get into. And one thing that gets people stuck in their tracks while building on a list is which keywords to actually work with in their site-building, web content and article creation efforts as this matters a lot if you are working on a time frame, say, a few months, within which you wish to see positive results.
You won’t see uniform results with every keyword. You will see better results with some keywords but suck with others. That is normal and has something to do with the nature of search engines which continuously tries to seek out the best and most relevant websites for searchers who are looking for information that relate to the keywords they use.
Now, the more webmasters use the same keywords in building their sites and optimize them for search engines, the more competition is created for those keywords. And the more that happens, the more difficult it is for most of those sites to get traffic from search engines through since you will need to beat more sites to get to the top of the search results.
The tools that I use for looking into keywords don’t involve fancy stuff and are basically composed of three tools that cost nothing. I don’t see myself buying any niche digging tools for now as I am quite satisfied with my current free ones, namely, the Adwords Keyword Tool, a spread sheet program (I use Open Office) and that gray thingie between your ears. More on tools in future posts.
Aside: A Primer on Search Engines (also known as Google)
Search engines do not divulge how exactly they determine which sites are the most appropriate sites to yield in search results but internet marketers have learned through SEO experimentation and practical experience that you don’t really need to know the exact ranking model (I assume it’s highly mathematical) to do well in this business because search engine algorithms are still based on simple human logic. And that logic is largely based on backlinks and relevancy.
Search engines figured out that the best way to judge the relative worth of a website is by evaluating the quantity and more so the quality of the backlinks it gets from other sites along with its relevancy to the topics it is associated with. The usual analogy that you will see in other dumbass blogs like this one is that search engines count backlinks as votes and the more votes it gets the better it spells for the site as far as search engine love is concerned. Relevancy is determined by the contextual value of the site and that is, in large part, assessed in the ranking model by determining what words or phrases are used in anchoring those backlinks.
If you link to this blog using “Article Marketing Strategy” as anchor text then you are putting in a vote for it and increases its rank among other blogs that are of similar nature. Meaning, if people used search using article marketing strategy, and assuming I have enough of the “votes” to land me on the top of the search result pages, you will then most likely find my blog there waiting for that clicky feeling.
—End Aside— (I’m hoping to write an article about how to figure out search engines and why we don’t need to waste a lot of time doing so… 
)
How I am doing with the course (Continued)
Okay so the past couple of days have been spent in researching for viable keywords using the TKA method. One valuable thing that you will learn with that internet marketing course is how to judge the competition for your keywords and key phrases and it establishes a rule that beginners can follow so they do not lose focus the way so many noobs out there (me included) are losing focus and screwing up their MMO projects’ chances of success.
The most important thing the course teaches you is how to determine which keywords to focus on such that your chances of success is increased within a very reasonable amount of time. This is huge! Because once you determine this aspect of your business, you can then pour all your time in creating the necessary infrastructure to support those keywords. Meaning, you now can focus on putting up the websites, the needed web content, and the all-important backlinks without ever wondering whether or not you are doing it right. Imagine executing SEO campaigns with a sure direction and without that shotgun approach that I know a lot of you are employing because you do not know which SEO strategies will actually work.
With a clear cut keyword research method, you will have that direction which you can go all out for every time.
Right now I’m finding that I am enjoying this aspect of building niche blogs and have spent a lot of hours doing the steps (it’s actually pretty simple) and following the rules in evaluating which keywords to consider and how to judge competition for those keywords. Next step is to get those keyword-powered niches sites up and figure out the efficient ways to create web content.
The 5-Articles-a-Day Pledge
We all know that one of the most difficult aspects of making money on the internet is web content creation. This is such a pain in the ass especially if you are still in the DIY route of things and still don’t have enough resources to be able to afford outsourced article-writing solutions.
Before going into the TKA course, I have been able to create a habit that I believe will serve me well in the months to come. I had been able to write 5 articles a day for a few days until some unforeseen circumstances such a huge ass typhoon plowing through where I am located and destroying properties and internet connection. I digress again.
I honestly doubted I could write 5 articles a day but it is now clear that with just the right frame of mind, you can get a lot of work done if you wanted to. I still have a 9 to 5 job to deal with so I can only spend about 3 to 4 hours on this business every day (more on weekends of course). So I think 5 articles a day is realistic although a little on the difficult side.
I currently can write one 400 to 500 word article in around 45 minutes. So creating 5 will take me about 3 to 4 hours. If I can shave that down further to 30 minutes the better but usually, if it involves topics that I am not familiar with, it might take longer than that but once I get the hang of the topics, I usually can whip out the words in an hour at most. Another web content creation strategy that I can adopt is to shorten the articles to around 300 words since its already sufficient according to Court. Doing that, if I can (I tend to overdo things sometimes), will save me more time.
I think I will be doing 300 words for article submissions and 400 to 500 words for niche blogs, hubs, barrels and lenses (and 2,000 words for this blog hehehe). Five articles a day means 35 articles a week. That should move me quicker but with the amount of work I’m in for, I’m thinking it’s still not enough. Will see what happens when I’ve put up my first niche sites a la TKA.
What needs to be done
I will need to wrap up my keyword competition research and come up with the final solid list of low-competition but potentially profitable keywords and start buying domains and putting up WordPress blogs and minisites on Hubpages and Infobarrels (and maybe Squidoo). After that, I will do research for web content and articles. It’s going to be rough and I might not be able to post here for quite a while. It’s okay my two readers will be fine without me.
If you are also in the TKA course you will know immediately that I am not employing its teachings on this blog. I have not really based my work on this blog on determining which keywords are less competitive. I know I’m in a very tough neighborhood but it does not matter right now. I’m using Grizzly’s gungho approach that with time and enough work, you will see positive results no matter the competition. If you are not in a hurry, I suggest just reading Grizzly’s Make Money Online for Beginners blog and follow what he does. It also works!
A general consensus among MMO experts is that authority sites are the wave of the MMO future. This blog will go in that direction and I hope to see you at the top in couple of years time. In the mean time, continue using keywords for your online businesses, your article marketing SEO campaigns, and let the search engines do the work for you.
Later.