How to do Affiliate Keyword Research & Make Money!

I had a request from a reader about how to do Affiliate Keyword Research and Make Money so I wanted to do the post for her.  Keyword research is using something like the Google Keyword Tool or a paid service that gather’s stats from multiple sources and provides you with different variations of keywords.  You can also use social media sites like Twitter and Facebook by using hashtags and keyword tools if they are provided.  If you are a travel Affiliate, you want people to share your site for bookings, with people they are traveling with or just because you have cool information and posts about the topic.  If you sell clothing, you want to make sure you get all variations and long tail and if you want to be a solution provider, you need to know what questions people have about a product and what types of answers they are looking for.  This is why you need to do keyword research.  It helps you to find search terms that have traffic and that you can create a site or content for that will be able to help solve a problem and get them to shop.  Here are 5 different ways that you can use the Google Keyword Tool and other solutions to do keyword research for blog posts, articles and even to help you find a good domain name, but more importantly, find relevant keywords, modifiers and phrases to bring quality traffic to your site so that you can make money.

Affiliate keyword research to find modifiers for products.

If you know the niche you are in, or you are writing a post about products, you’ll want to use the Keyword tool to find modifiers.  Modifiers are the long tail terms that exist off of or before the main root word or phrase.  Suppose you want to build a site that is all about Prada and their products.  You have a great url and an awesome datafeed that has their entire line of clothing and accessories.  The first thing you should do is type in Prada and not use the box that asks if you only want closely related terms.  By clicking on this you will get a fairly large list of variations of the word Prada and their search volumes.   If you decide that you don’t really want to go after their sunglasses or maybe you just want to start with men’s clothing, then you can use these results to start building out your site.

Now that you know you want to start on the men’s clothing section, type in a few variations of prada men’s, prada for men, men’s prada shirts, etc…  Now you can use the check box to only show closely related terms or you can leave it blank and hope it continues to bring back relevant terms.

If you look at the image above when I used these phrases you now have products (a brand in this case) and a ton of modifiers and the search volumes for each that you can work with.  You’ll see things like cheap, discount, outlet and also see people looking for specific things like colors, items numbers, styles and names of specific lines or items.  All of these will be important depending on the type of shopper you want.  If you want the price conscious Fashionista, go with the cheaper terms, but you may also want to combine the other ones in to get even more people coming.  If you want people that know exactly what they are looking for and want to buy, set up a price comparison or recommend the perfect store and feature that product.  You may also want to stay away from some of the cheaper modifiers if you want a higher sale off of the single product.

Using keyword research to answer questions

Google is awesome for finding answers to questions.  If you know people that buy a specific product will have questions about refills, issues to fix it or that the product has easy cross and upsells, you can do keyword research to find the questions and also to find the keywords for the solutions to these.  You may even find combinations that tie in the cross and upsells for the products.  Then you can take these terms and use them on your site where you can sell the tools to fix the product, tools to make or create something or even just feature the complimentary products to the question or search query.

One example is how to build a hummingbird feeder.  When I do the search query I find best, buy, perky pet, bee proof, stopper, replacement parts and a ton of other things.  Buy, best and perky pet sound like people that know the exact type they want or are someone who is in the shopping process.  By using these modifiers that you find with high search volumes you can create a comparison site and find long tail keywords as well as get people who are looking for one or who have questions and are comparing two or three types of hummingbird feeders.

Bee stopper sounds like someone who is looking to buy one that stops bees, for a site that has instructions on how to stop bees or can recommend products that stop bees from getting to their hummingbird feeder.  By using this knowledge you can go back to the keyword tool and try something like hummingbird feeder bees and do a closely related terms search or another general one.  By typing hummingbird feeder bees into the search box I got a ton of question ideas to use in my copy, it gave me another bug to keep away “ants” and different variations of how to keep, best way to keep, keep bees off of, etc…  It also gave me another idea to write about with the word recipes.  Now I can do a page for each of these, I can do a page with recipes to help keep bees off of hummingbird feeders and I can sell products, supplies and even ingredients to help provide a solution for the person who was asking a question and needed to find a solution.

Using keyword research to find complimentary products

If you have an automatic kitty litter cleaning box site, you know that people will need refills.  That is the most obvious one.  By typing in the name of the automatic kitty litter cleaning litter box you can now discover that the manufacturer makes a ton of other accessories that are great for the litter box.  There can be tents, carpets to wipe their feet on so litter doesn’t track through your house, new kinds of litter that work better, etc…  By using the keyword of the product or service your site is about, you can find complimentary products to promote within the site and hopefully be able to cross sell why people may want to buy them.  If you do dedicated pages to these complimentary products, you can build a stronger internal linking structure and use the keyword research techniques above to find modifiers and hopefully get long tail and high volume traffic to these pages.  If you use keyword research to find questions and solutions, you can find article ideas that help to solve issues with the automatic kitty litter box and then write an article that explains how buying this product can possibly help to solve their issue.

Using keyword research to find article ideas

One thing that doing keyword research is amazing for is finding ideas for articles or a series of posts.  If you take your general topic and type it in, it can find a ton of questions people have and then you can answer them.  If you use the questions as terms, you can then find other variations.  If you have a site about travel, you can use the keyword tool to find landmarks and interesting things you may not have known about before.  You can also see what’s hot, what people are looking for in the area, festivals you might not have known about or even give warnings about why people shouldn’t go.  Twitter is actually an awesome keyword research tool for this.  Once you have the topics, you can either sell tickets to this place, tickets to the events, travel supplies to take to this event or place specifically or a ton of other things.  By using country based searches on news sites or even Google news combined with the keyword research tool you can find out if there are festivals, riots or even cool events happening that aren’t normal.  Keyword research and using social media to do it can help you generate a ton of new article ideas.

Finding urls using keyword research

Keyword research is awesome for finding urls.  Here are 5 ways you can do it.

1. Find high volume exact matches that are short in length.
2. Find words used by a community about a product or topic and then buy a relevant, similar or brandable url that relates to the high volume term.
3. Use it to find the top 50 of a certain thing.  @EricNagel did this with Dog Breeds to find exact match urls for a specific type of product.
4. Find questions with high search volumes and then search for the urls that aren’t taken and that are also relevant to or are the actual question.
5. Find keywords for product combinations like necklace and earring sets and then go find a relevant url for the product combinations with a high search volume or a targeted search query.

You can use keyword research for just about anything in Affiliate marketing content wise.  It can be used to find topics to write about, the keywords and phrases to use within your posts and also how to find other products to promote.  You can use it to buy a domain name and also use keyword research to format the site based on the most popular issues or search volumes with the product or service.  You can use it to sell products to create, fix or find a solution and buy a product or issue and also to find new niches to enter into.  Keyword research is a huge part of Affiliate marketing and is something that you should start doing if you aren’t already.  You’ll be amazed at how much more effective you can be as an Affiliate if you know how to do keyword research and if you actually take the time to do it.