An open letter to Bruce, Part II:

So, we have our cookie tasting, in that we know what our passion is. And now we are looking for the milk to dunk it in. That’s some product we can get behind – one that helps the community we are part of to solve its problems (or some problem) and help everyone live a better life.

Once we figure out that product, we then have to know what keywords people use to look for that solution.

Google Adwords tool (KeywordToolExternal) can sometimes be way off the mark. Mostly if that website isn’t optimized for adsense correctly, I would guess. Only seen this twice, but even when the keyword density says something, Google can somehow twist their LSI over into something else entirely.

OK, but say we’ve got a solution. Let’s take Ken Evoy’s Site Build It product line. A proven solution that’s survived and expanded over time. And it has an affiliate product, so we don’t have to arrange any ecommerce backend or dropship anything. So far, so good.

The next problem is figuring out what they are saying, and what keywords they are using to enable search engines to find them. (Most of the rest tackle this from the other end, finding where people are looking and then finding a product you can pitch using those keywords.)

Most of the tools I’ve used to reverse engineer someone’s site aren’t designed to do much down this line. Best free online tool I’ve found at this point is called Keyword Analysis Tool from Hoskinson.net – a nice and simple interface and effective in figuring out the keyword density for phrases.  (It also has a nice Ultimate Research Assistant plugged into it, so you can do text mining and additional research along with esoteric mind maps and other fascinating stuff.)

The trick with Keyword Density is that the top SEO experts aren’t using it anymore. So it might or might not be accurate as far as the best keywords for that page.

Here’s the trick: grab (screen scrape – no export to text function, sorry) and plop the probable ones into Google Adwords Tool, with synonyms  checked. This can then tell you demand, trend and CPC for the keywords on that page.  A left-brained thing you can to do double-check this is to check “exact” on phrases and the export the data to a spreadsheet. Add another column where you multiply demand by the CPC – this gives you potential income from that keyword. (A keyword with high CPC, but low competition won’t rate as high as huge demand with a much lower CPC.)

I’m not going to get into KEI discussions with you here, essentially because “competition” in these days of social media is a moot point. Not only did Charles Helfin pretty much debunk those “millions” of pages Google serves up, but also the whole point that re-purposing content through various social media (video, podcasts, presentations, articles, documents) will have your same keyword-laden content competing with themselves for top positions on Google.  (See Howie Schwartz’ “Conversation Domination” and Jack Humphrey’s “Bending the Web”.  All their work is getting old now…)

Once you’ve tested the keywords, you can check with other tools for the competition for those terms and see who is doing what with these (like SEO for Firefox plugin). And you can check their incoming links, etc. You know, generally start your Marketing Research.

Then set up your Google Alerts to find fresh content and crank out your own. Add in some blog and forum searches so you can assist the community with your content, and you are now just cranking out routinely valuable content with a product that matches your passion.

Where Affiliate Marketing and Lead Generation like this has failed in the past is because some product or company simply folds up. So pick a long-lasting company with substantial background and history. You can always edit your template and old posts to include a new affiliate link – but that is a real pain in the butt.

Hope this helps.

What’s your view on this?

Some additional posts of interest:

• The death of search engines isn’t widely exaggerated at all…
• WordPress site-building sequence
• There’s buyers, marketing, social media – and then there’s the real world…
• Lead Generation made easy – blog it.
• Laws of Keyword Usage – all keywords are not created equal
• How search engines used to work
• Why I’ve learned to love link-bait scraping