Finding Profitable Keywords

Over the past several years Google Adwords has become THE most effective way to guarantee a steady stream of traffic and income for your website.

With that being said, it's also become pretty tough to keep Google from taking your money... Adwords courses have popped up left and right claiming to teach you the "secret" to making money with Google Adwords. While these courses DO teach you different strategies for improving your click through rate and the quality of your Adwords
ads, they fail when it comes to one MAJOR aspect of Google Adwords, and this is...

Finding profitable keywords!

Without profitable keywords, you're not going to make money, no matter how well written your ad is.

Well, in today's chapter, I want to let you in on the 1 TRUE "secret" to finding profitable keywords in the Google Adwords system. I'll take you through a step by step example that will show you what I do to virtually guarantee I find profitable keywords. So, let's get started...

Step 1

This isn't a lesson on product development, so I'm assuming that you already have a product you want to
promote. Ok, once we have our product, we need to go to Google and enter some very broad search term related to our product.

In this example, let's choose the keyword "keyword research". You can choose any keyword that's related to your product. In this example, my product is a keyword research software program, so I chose the keyword "keyword research".

Step 2

Once we do this, we'll want to pick one or more of the websites that are advertising in the Google Adwords section of Google. You can see above that I've chosen www.webseodesign.com.

This is the website that I'll be monitoring over the next several weeks. Keep this in mind because it's very important.

The idea here is that the longer a website bids on a keyword, the greater the chance that the keyword is profitable (i.e. It's making them money!)

The same can be said in the "real world" as well... The longer an ad runs in a magazine, tv, or a newspaper, the greater chance it's making the owner money, or he wouldn't keep advertising the same ad.

This information is GOLD and isn't to be taken lightly...

Step 3

The next step is to use a keyword generation software program OR come up with a big list of related keywords yourself. I'd recommend at least using a free keyword tool like the Overture search term suggestion tool (inventory.overture.com) and entering your main keyword. Personally, I find the free tools don't give me the number of keywords I need, and they also work much slower. I use Keyword Elite to generate bigger lists of
keywords... But, like I said, you can still use a free tool and it should work "ok".

To keep it simple for this example, we'll use the Overture search term suggestion tool. If you do have Keyword Elite, use that software instead.

We'll enter the keyword "keyword research" into Overture and click "ok"

You can see that the Overture tool gives us a larger list of keywords we can work with. We'll then need to copy and paste those keywords into an Excel spreadsheet. What we're going to do is we'll go back to Google and "one by one" we're going to see if www.webseodesign.com is bidding on any of these keywords.

Take a look at the Excel spreadsheet below to see what I mean...

All we need to do now is go through our list of keywords and manually check Google to see if our website is advertising using each of the keywords. We'll do this once every 1-3 days and update our spreadsheet accordingly.

After at least 3 weeks, we'll then look at our spreadsheet and take those keywords that www.webseodesign.com has been bidding on, for the longest period of time... and use those keywords for our own Adwords ad, nearly guaranteeing our chances of also being profitable!

The principle is very simple here. Don't gloss over this... The longer a website is advertising with a keyword, they're either making money with the keyword OR they're extremely stupid and are throwing money away. Chances are, it's the former.

For the longest time, I did the exact steps above manually like I've shown you. It works very well, although it does take a bit of time to manually check each keyword and update your spreadsheet. Especially if you have, say 100 keywords... let alone 1,000!

That's when I got smart, or I guess you could say... lazy. Earlier I mentioned I use Keyword Elite to generate big keyword lists, well, I also use Keyword Elite to automatically do the process above for me. I don't have to do anything
but paste in the URL I want to analyze, and paste in the keywords I want to monitor. Click ok... and Keyword Elite does all this for me.

Let's go through the steps using Keyword Elite, for those of you that already own Keyword Elite or if you decide to ever get a copy, you'll know exactly what to do to get tons of profitable keywords quickly.