AJ McClary - User Experience Consultant » Keyword Research

Using Negetive Keywords

A.J. McClary — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:18:59 +0000

Did you know that Google allows you to bid on Negative keywords as well? This can help you out tremendously if you do your research. For example, if I were promoting a digital product, like a “learn to sing” course, I would probably want to remove certain types of visitors from my website. You can do this two ways, you could qualify your visitors with very relevant ads (sometimes by adding the price of the product to the ad) or you could register negative keywords with your advertising campaign. These are some visitors I frequently remove from a digital product’s campaign:

iso
cheat
free
p2p
serial
key
warez
crack
hack
password
cracked
keygen
torrent

All of the above keywords relate to illegal ways of obtaining a digital product, and I know through my research that promoting to these people are a complete waste of money because they are most likely not interested in buying the product. The benefit to using negative keywords is that you increase your Click-Through Rate (CTR) and you lower your Cost Per Click (CPC) because you are removing visitors that are not relevant to your business. If you were to simply qualify your visitors, your CTR would be decreased, so you actually end up saving money instantly.

You also want to use negative keywords when bidding on phrases that can have other meanings. For example, if you’re bidding on “houses”, you may want to remove some of the following:

doll (for doll houses)
half way (for half way houses)
dog (for dog houses)

Does this make sense? Look at how much money you could save if you removed your ad from searches that didn’t relate to your business.

My “Formula” to Getting Traffic

A.J. McClary — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:08:55 +0000

I’m an Internet Marketer by trade. It is my full-time career to make websites look good and make money for people. The problem that I constantly see, however, is that a lot of my clients simply don’t understand everything involved with making a website marketable. Some think that it’s your web design that makes you marketable, with the “if you build it, they will come” mentality. Some are more concerned about simply having a website with a contact page, with the “if I have a website, everyone will find me and contact me instantly” mentality. The truth is, it takes a lot of work to a get a website together that is marketable and achieving the conversions you’re looking for. Here is my formula. I can’t guarantee it will work for every business, but it certainly works for me.

Steps to getting quality traffic to your website:

Before developing your website, make sure it exists in a quality niche that is both competitive (but not too competitive) and profitable. Do keyword research to see what people are searching for and try to solve their problems. A good friend once told me that in this world, there are two ways to make it in business: (1) by giving and (2) by taking. I encourage you to make your money using method number one. You’ll find a sense of pride and comfort when building your online business.

Create a very high quality design that is optimized for SEO, keeps people wanting more, and drives visitors to return. To find this “design”, simply find a website that you admire who is doing very well and mimic the layout. Replace their graphics for your graphics, make this your own design. Work with a web designer (to hire me, just click the contact form) to get your ideas together in Photoshop and get the ball rolling.

Layout your design into individual web pages. Make sure every image has an ALT tag, make sure every page is keyword dense, make sure that every body fits in with relevant keywords. Never include a hyper link that says “click here”. Make sure every page is filled with TITLE tags, META tags, and that you’re utilizing valid XHTML in your code. Make sure that you’re Section 508 compliant as well. Avoid using the TABLE tag if you can accomplish the same thing using simple XHTML tags and CSS.

Begin to write content for all of your pages. Make sure you have a page for free resources that will help you get organic traffic from the search engines. Hire a copywriter to write keyword dense articles for you. You need at least 20 to see an impact on your traffic. Make sure these articles are answering the questions that web surfers are asking the search engines. Lay all of your articles out on your pages and remember to continue adding articles at least weekly to keep the traffic coming in.

Start an Article Marketing campaign. Write an article that isn’t on your website and begin to distribute that article to article directories. Try Article Submitter for a great application that does it for free. Submit only to article sites that have good PageRanks. Sometimes it might be a good idea to “spin” your articles prevent getting held up in Google’s duplicate content penalty. Write a few articles if necessary and submit them on different iterations to remaining directories.

Create a squeeze page on your site where you’re trying to sell your product. Make sure that the squeeze page is making conversions from your current SEO campaign. Once you find a good conversion rate…

Start a Google AdWords campaign and begin to direct traffic to that squeeze page that has a good conversion rate. At this point, it’s a matter of spending money to make money–fueling a money making machine.

Begin to promote that same squeeze page on as many advertising services as possible. Consider starting a Site Targeted Campaign on as many relevant website as possible.

And finally, rake in the dough!

This is my “formula” and it works every time for me. Keep in mind, I didn’t include time periods in this because the amount of time you should spend on each step is contingent upon Google’s time to crawl your website, the time for you get a PageRank, and the time it takes for you to complete your tasks (like writing articles, designing website, optimization, etc.) I recommend that if you’re interested in marketing your product or service, begin optimizing your website for SEO. For the most part, SEO is completely free and sometimes has better conversion rates than PPC. Start your PPC campaign when you know the results are coming in and that your converting traffic.

Keyword Research

A.J. McClary — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 13:17:25 +0000

Researching keywords can take you a very long way. This is one of the reasons why I recommend to my web design students to read this book before they get involved with website that may or may not be successful. Before I get into the technicalities of researching keywords, I’d like to tell you a story of a failure I had when I first started out in Internet Marketing.I was promoting a guitar course called Amazing Guitar Secrets and it was the first product I’ve ever promoted online. I had purchased Dan Denley’s massive guitar training course and was so impressed with it, I absolutely had to promote it myself. So, I opened up a Google AdWords account, made tons of mistakes, and bid on the dumbest keywords ever. One keyword I used was “Guitar Chords” and I generated hundreds of clicks per day but after a week of sending traffic, I had no sales. I gave up Internet Marketing soon later and decided that affiliate programs were just another “get rich scheme” and there was no way for me to make a living with it.

On a whim, I decided to dive back into affiliate marketing, because I saw so many of my favorite websites gain huge successes as a result. After plenty of reading, I realized WHY my AdWords campaign failed. It wasn’t Amazing Guitar Secrets that caused me to fail-they specifically designed there home page to generate as many sales as possible, obviously the ball was in my court and my failures were my fault. I realized that “guitar chords” was not exactly what the person was searching for. Bidding on such a vague keyword is like shooting fish in a pond. Instead, I decided to bid on something much more specific like: “How to Play Guitar”. By bidding on such a targeted phrase, I finally started getting conversions.

If there is anything I can teach you from my story, it is that researching keywords that work vs. keywords that don’t work are imperative to your success as an Internet Marketer. There are several places you can go to research, here are a few that I recommend.

WordTracker is probably the best website to use when researching keywords. They do charge a small fee for their service, but you don’t need any kind of subscription if you’re only generating keywords for one website.
Another service is Keyword Discovery, which is highly comparable to that of the Word Tracker service.
There are also some free alternatives. Yahoo! Search Marketing has a keyword tool that will help you find relevant keywords in your category called the Inventory Search.
Google also has a few tools, including their Google Suggest tool and their Keyword Tool for Google AdWords.
SEO Book also has a wonderful keyword research tool as well.

When researching keywords, it’s also very important to remember that some of the first results these tools give you are going to be very competitive. Many people find much more success by researching “niche” keywords, which help them generate better traffic via organic search results and pay-per-click.

For my Amazing Design Secrets Course, I got into a very competitive market. It wasn’t that there were hundreds of other books just like mine-on the contrary; I have one of the only good web design internet marketing books on the internet-but I was competing against Universities who had web design programs (and were willing to pay as much as $10 per click for their website to be listed in Google AdWords). I had to get creative and go niche, so I tailored my product for individuals who wanted to learn web design to make money. Instead of bidding on keywords like “how to design a website”, I bid on “how to design a website for affiliates” and “how to market a website online”.

Finding the right keywords will save you an enormous amount of time and money in the long run and will bring you plenty of other benefits.