And here’s the upsell I promised…

One of the questions I get asked on a regular basis is how to choose keywords to target.

There’s no single correct answer on this and I’m not big headed enough to claim I’ve got all the answers.

What I do know is that Google is stupidly big. At the very least it’s got 4 trillion pages (4,000,000,000,000) indexed. Likely more.

Which means it’s got its work cut out delivering the results we all expect in the blink of an eye.

To do that, it takes short cuts.

You’ve already noticed that it bolds the words you searched for in the results. That’s partly to reassure you that it’s returned the results you were looking for.

But it also shows you where it’s failed to get decent results.

In an ideal world, Google wants the page title to have all the words you searched for, in the order you typed them in, without any other words in the way.

It also wants the same in the main body text of the page.

And ideally in at least some of the links pointing to the page.

For a popular search, that’s easy for it to find. Which means it has to use other factors to decide who’s going to be shown below the paid-for results that keep its shareholders happy.

For the kind of search I go for, it has its work cut out and really earns its money.

Or actually, quite often, doesn’t earn any money as I tend to find very few adverts shown for the kind of phrases I target. Or some poorly informed advertiser who’s relying on broad match to bring up relevant searches to advertise for (if I was that advertiser, I’d fire the person who was losing me money by advertising like that).

At this level, the Google Keyword Tool figures are as real as Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

They’re guesswork.

I was going to say inspired guesswork but I don’t believe that to be the case.

So I’ll stick with guesswork.

If you want to target competitive keywords, don’t bother with this upsell.

It’s not about that.

It’s about finding the hidden gems that are searched for every now and then.

A handful of people in the world per month at best.

Yup, you could actually put them in a small-ish room and still have room to swing a cat.

Except that they are spread out over the 4 corners of the world, so it would cost you a fortune to herd them and put them all in a room.

There are quite a few things I like about this kind of keyword phrase:

• I’m lazy by nature and these fit with that as you’ll discover.
• They rank fairly fast because Google’s algorithm gets excited when it can do a better match on a phrase than “well, all those words are probably on the page somewhere”
• Visitors are in buying mode. They’re fed up to the back teeth with getting irrelevant results. So when they find my page, they read it and click the link I recommend. Then buy the product. Probably with a feeling of relief.
• I can set it and forget it. No-one else in the world has even close to optimised a page for this phrase. None of those 4,000,000,000,000+ pages.
• I show up for all sorts of related keywords I’d never have even thought of. All with similarly low searches. All with no competition. Which is why the Google guesswork search figures are wrong. A handful of searches x lots of similar searches that no-one has ever predicted mounts up. Especially when you’re producing pages regularly.
• I can get one article written on iWriter and be in profit at the first sale.

If you’d like to dig inside my mind and find out how to do this, here’s what you’ll get:

• An overview video. I’d suggest that you watch this first and then use it as revision once you know all the pieces to the jigsaw.
• A video showing how I use Google to find keywords for me. I may check them in the keyword tool but that’s not how I find them. This method finds keywords before the keyword tool and has resulted in a lot of phrases for me that have “no searches” according to the tool but real Google users are using time and time again. So no competition on these from people using the keyword tool, Market Samurai or any other posh, expensive, keyword tool.
• A video showing how I use another Google tool that you might have heard of but Google near-enough keep hidden in the dark, dusting it off or changing its name every now and then in the hope it will get used more.
• A video showing another way I use Amazon to get keyword ideas. Remember than Amazon isn’t a real shop – most of the time you can’t really browse apart from maybe using the “look inside” feature. So Amazon keywords are buyer keywords. Read that again: Amazon keywords are buyer keywords.
• Two videos showing how I put all this together and use it on my sites. Including how I get decent quality articles written on iWriter for $3 each. You’ll see how fast these come back and how I accept or reject them. And then put them into my site, ready to get crawled on Google and shown in the search results.
• You’ll also see how I use the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin to make sure I haven’t missed anything too important on the web page.

All in all, there are 7 videos totalling somewhere around 3 hours (give or take – I haven’t actually totalled up the minutes).

Stuff that you may or may not have come across before – I’ve not met you, so I don’t know.

But certainly stuff that I’ve not seen taught anywhere else.

Probably because people like me are just knuckling down and using it rather than showing other people what to do.

Even though the chance of me competing with you is near enough zero.

Heck, it’s unusual if I’m competing with one out of EzineArticles, Wikihow or Ehow when I stoop this low on searches.

So we’re talking hen’s teeth here.

But these hen’s teeth mount up.

A click here, a click there, a commission that’s maybe related to the phrase I was targeting.

Or, because we’re talking obscure searches here, maybe not. But I don’t care about that so long as I get the commission.

That’s why I like the hypnosis site. They’ve got over 800 niches they’re aiming at. So people upsell themselves a lot of the time.

Which means a lot of the time, I’ve found the keyword, put it into a spreadsheet, batched them up with 5 or 10 other similarly obscure keywords, sent them off to iWriter and gone off to watch some television.

Then a hour or two later, I accept or reject the articles, post the acceptable ones on my site, add an image and a smattering of optimisation, then do the next one.

You can find out how I do all this by buying the upsell if you want to:

If you don’t want the upsell at the moment, no worries. Check your email for the link or just click here.