Mar 19, 2009

PPC Web Spy - Free PPC Keyword Spy Tools for Firefox

PPC Web Spy is a firefox extension for keyword research. With this amazing keyword spy tool, you can "Secretly Spy On & Uncover Anyones Google-Adword Keywords While You Browse Google In Real-Time!"

I am not a great fan of PPC keyword spy tools specially because most of them are so complex and time consuming that it just doesn't appeal to me. Everyone knows keyword research is so important for SEM or SEO campaigns, before i find PPCWebSpy i always using keyword research tools like Keyword Discovery or WordTracker.

When i begin to develop a new niche, there are 10 must-do things for keyword research:
  • pick valid initial keywords
  • use a variety of sources
  • search from the point of view of your potential customers
  • get the most possible amount of keyphrases
  • keep the keywords that will attract the target audience
  • pick the small-medium competitive keyword phrases
  • research your competitors, and get keywords of their ppc ad campaigns
  • spot the topics for your content (site pages, articles, blog posts, press releases, etc)
  • use keyword research data
  • write website content
All these things spend me about 2-4 weeks hard word! But now, PPCWebSpy save me much more time to doing these.

With the information PPC Web Spy provides, you'll be able to take a struggling internet business and almost instantly turn it into a profitable business!


To my surprise the basic level of PPCWebSpy is absolutely free. This means that you can go to PPC WebSpy Page now and get your copy absolutely free.

What can YOU do with PPC Web Spy?

Here's a brief rundown of the specific "features" within PPC Web Spy...

You'll be able to quickly and easily uncover any Google Adwords advertiser's keywords in only a few seconds! Then, simply take those keywords and advertise your own product or service and get ready for the money to come rolling in!

You'll be able to see critical Adwords data relating to each keyword. Data such as:

  • The actual Adwords ads your competitors have written for each keyword
  • The Cost Per Click, or amount your competitors are paying for each keywords they're bidding on
  • Your competitor's Adwords rank, so you'll be able to determine how much money you should be spending to get your site to a similar rank, to expect similar results.
  • The total daily amount your competition is spending via Google Adwords
  • And much more!
You can use PPC Web Spy to generate your own giant list of keywords based upon any of the individual keywords your competition is using!
You can also generate a giant, targeted keyword list by inputting your competitor's domain name, allowing you to build an even larger, more targeted keyword list!

You'll be able to immediately see which Adwords advertisers are people promoting Clickbank.com, Paydotcom.com, or Amazon.com products!

Doing will allow you to find potential super affiliates. Once you've done that, you can use PPC Web Spy to "steal" their keywords, advertise the same product, and bank the money yourself!

You'll even be able to see the exact landing page (i.e. destination URL) that each Adwords advertiser is sending visitors to, WITHOUT actually clicking on their Adwords ad and charging them money.
What do all of these features mean for YOU?

It means that you'll be able to shave off hours, days, months, and even years of time doing keyword research and testing exactly which keywords convert visitors to buyers. It means you won't have to waste massive amounts of money as you slowly figure out your market's "best" keywords.

I can guarantee you that PPC Web Spy saves you both time & money... and because PPC Web Spy is not a bulky, standalone, desktop application, you'll be able to save money and time as you causally browse Google like you normally would. It's VERY cool, and powerful.

ppcwebspy

10 must do things for keyword research

Keyword research is the core of any SEO campaign, since the keywords you pick during the research will be included in your website copy, into your PPC campaigns and any other website promotion campaigns. In a sense, keyword research is similar to customer research, because you are studying what words your potential clients use when searching for your service or product.

Here is what you need to do to run a solid keyword research:

  • pick valid initial keywords
  • use a variety of sources
  • search from the point of view of your potential customers
  • get the most possible amount of keyphrases
  • keep the keywords that will attract the target audience
  • pick the small-medium competitive keyword phrases
  • research your competitors, and get keywords of their ppc ad campaigns
  • spot the topics for your content (site pages, articles, blog posts, press releases, etc)
  • use keyword research data
  • write website content

Alright, let's go about this in detail.

Pick valid initial keywords

When starting your keyword research, you'll need to pick the main keywords to base your keyword research on. These will be the keywords that you, your customers and your competitors chiefly use when speaking of your service or product. The valid keywords would be synonyms, different in one aspect or another - view them as the directions your website SEO will go. Naturally, you'll need to use quite a variety of sources for your keywords.

Use a variety of sources

To make sure you have the maximum possible coverage for your keywords, you'll want to use any source of customer data you can use. Those would be:

  • your own knowledge: you should be aware of at least one word that your service or product can be characterized by
  • your own customers: talk to your customers and see if they associate any other words with you
  • your competitors: check your competitor's websites for even more keywords

Also, you may want to use other search engine data keyword research tools, such as:

Google Keyword suggestion tool can give you keywords, related to your website (if you select the appropriate tab) and offers you a wide selection of phrases real people have typed in.

WordTracker and Keyword Discovery offer free versions of their keyword research tools. They give you a list of keyword phrases with your keyword and also give you some estimation of their popularity. You can purchase a monthly subscription for about $30-50 to get full access to their data.

WordTracker uses the data from the meta search engines and KeywordDiscovery obtains data in another way (undisclosed, so far), so the online tools data can only be used in a relative aspect (to learn which phrases are more or less popular than others and also how competitive they are).

Overture doesn't offer exact results as well, so it can be used only as described above.

Over all the tools, I highly recommend a free version of WordTracker. It offers enough data to sift through (multiply the number of searches by 1.7 to get a rough estimate of daily Google queries). Google External Keyword Tool goes 2nd, as it offers lots of related words and phrases, otherwise unnoticed by other keyword research tools.

Try various points of view

The point is that there is no such a thing as 'an average customer'. You'll need to create content about various aspects of your business to make sure you are noticeable to all types of potential customers, simply because your customers use all possible word combinations to find what they want and you can't predict what they will use to find you.

For instance, your potential clients may be searching for material that will remove any doubt they have before becoming your customer or for some product or service reviews and comparison. Moreover, there may be numerous products and features that may apply to your business - you may want to cover them also.

Get the most keyword phrases

Once done with determining the valid keywords and thinking outside the box, you'll need to build a list of all possible keyword combinations you can think of. It is relatively simple to build a list of keywords yourself, from your customers and competitors, but it may require more time finding the keywords with the help of online tools.

You'll need to keep entering your main keywords and phrases into online keyword suggestion tools to get every possible keyword combination. This will ensure you cover most keywords your potential customers will use.

Keep the target keywords

Obviously, you only need keywords that will drive potential customers to your website. Additional traffic won't hurt, but it won't do you any good either and you'll be spending the extra time and efforts on doing your work for the untargeted keywords.

Basically, a target keyword is a keyword that your potential customers will be using to find you. If you are selling only widgets, you don't need people searching for gadgets and visa versa. That being said, you'll need people searching for 'how to choose a widget', 'how to choose a widget manufacturer', 'the benefits of having a widget', etc.

Pick small or medium competitive keywords

If your site is new, there is no way you can come up for a competitive keyword within a couple of years, so you'll need to target non-competitive keywords. These are usually 3-5 keyword phrases or may be even 2-keyword phrases, if both of the keywords are not competitive.

If you have an old site (over a year or two), you should know which keywords are more or less competitive. You can keep all the keywords to gain more insight what to add to your website.

Research your competitors, and get keywords of their ppc ad campaigns

Using PPCWebSpy or KeywordSpy tools to view what keywords used by your competitors. May be you think this is immoral, but your competitors is using these tools to monitor your keywords of PPC compains in Google.

You should using these absolutely free keyword spy tools, Why not?

Spot the topics for the content

Now the fun begins. By now you should have a huge list of keyword phrases, but you don't know how to apply it to your website or your head hurts when you think of it. Let's start small, then.

First, you'll need to group the keyword phrases by one or two main keywords they have in common. For instance, 'large light widget' and 'large shiny widget' go in one group, while 'small light widget' will go to another group, because we already have two main keywords. The end of this process would be a list of keyword phrases, grouped by common keyword(s).

The groups you divided your keywords denote the topics you should write your content on. See if you can write a topic around a single keyword phrase. If not, seek a complimentary keyword phrase from the keyword group or the whole list, and check again.

Finally, you should arrive at a list of topics that you should write about.

How to use the keyword research data?

Naturally, you'll need to use your keyword research results. The only way you can do that is to create or modify your existing content. You'll be adding your keywords to your page titles, meta tags (they are used to display description snippets in the SERPs), link anchor texts, etc apart from writing website copy.

Writing content after keyword research

One of the ways was briefly outlined before: write content for your website. But how many pages/articles/posts do you need to write? Here your content strategy comes into play. You'd be better off creating fewer pages, but of extreme top quality. This will ensure that natural links from folks that enjoyed it will point to a single place, which will add more weight to a single page, which had been targeted at numerous related keywords, which will ensure that that single page will come up for numerous related phrases in the SERPs.

Of course, you may as well create a page for each of the unique keyword phrase. But bear in mind that should a search engine regard another page for a similar keyword more important, your efforts for creating near-duplicate pages will be disregarded and you won't gain much after a thoroughly conducted keyword research.

Conclusion

The techniques, described above, for conducting a keyword research are viable and have been tested by a professional SEO (at least by someone who works as a SEO for a web and software development company), so it should be a good start for managing your keywords. There may be other advanced keyword research strategies, but you'll only need and find them when you are familiar with the basics of keyword research.

Such a thorough keyword research should be a good asset to the overall website success, so it should be used carefully. Keyword research can't give you substantially different data every time you conduct this, unless you find a radically different avenue for search query data, so you should use the keyword research data (modify your site, write content) cautiously. If not, you'll have to rework what you have done and will lose precious time (and, maybe, reputation) if done improperly.

Mar 4, 2009

Submitting Article - Article Writing for Affiliates Day 6

Day 6 - Submitting Your Article

If you have followed all of the steps in the course, you now have a complete article to submit. Review your article at least one time before submitting it to the article directories. Check your spelling, grammar and flow.

The easiest way to do this is to read your article out loud. You will catch about 70 percent of your grammar mistakes by using this step.

If you aren't a very good speller, you may want to have someone else proofread your article before you submit.

Use the Best Practices Guide to Article Marketing prior to submitting your article to make sure you have formatted your article correctly. Also make sure you have included everything you need to include in your article (The 8 Minute Article Writer will also help you with this).

Next, sign up for an account with Article Marketer. If you are on a tight budget, then you can sign up for a free account. This account allows you to submit up to three articles a week to 29 article directories and 11,000+ publishers. This is an excellent way to get started with article submission.

If your budget is a little less tight, the upgraded account allows you to submit unlimited articles to over 5,000 article directories and over 67,000 publishers. This includes a one-day turnaround on your article.

If you prefer to submit your articles manually, see the distribution list at Article Marketer for more details.

This completes the course. You now have all of the tools you need to make money writing and submitting your articles.

Summaries, Beginnings and Conclusions - Article Writing for Affiliates Day 4

Day 4 - Summaries, Beginnings and Conclusions

Once you have written the heart of the article, it's time to put the finishing touches on it.

You can write these parts in any order you like. What's important is that you put these parts in the right place in the articles.

Your summary is not actually part of the article. The summary is usually what readers see when they visit article directories or blogs where the excerpt function is used.

The purpose of your summary is to entice readers to read the article. A good summary is no more than 400 characters long. It should contain your keyword phrase you are using, and you want to give readers a taste of the actual article. "Sell" them on reading the article.

The beginning is the opening of your article. It is very similar to the summary in that its purpose is to tell the readers what your article is about. It is an extension of the title. In other words, it gives a little more detail than the title.

How long you make your beginning is up to you. It's really not necessary to write anything longer than one or two paragraphs and then lead into the article.

The conclusion summarizes your article and belongs at the end. It is also a lead in to your resource box where you tell others about your business.

Each of these elements should contribute to getting readers to click through to your site.

Keep your summaries, beginnings, and conclusions short and sweet. To write an effective article, you want to keep it within word guidelines, which is 400 - 700. Give your readers a taste of what you offer on your site. This will get you the click.

Get the most from your articles. Read the Best Practices Guide to Article Marketing. This guide will help you get the most from your article submission because you'll write articles the article directories want and readers will love.

Writing Tools Recommendation

Stylewritter plain english writing software can help you improve your article writing skill.

Whitesmoke 2009 english grammar software is the best grammar & spelling check software for ESL

Ready for the next lesson?

Go to Day 5 - "How to Write Your Resource Box"

How to Write Your Resource Box - Article Writing for Affiliates Day 5

Day 5 - How to Write Your Resource Box

Although every element of your article is important, the most important are the title and the resource box. The title will determine if your readers read the article. The resource box will determine whether or not visitors click through to your site.

The resource box is like a mini ad for your business. You don't want to write something that is too commercial. You want to create a resource box that gets your article readers to click through to your website.

There are two types of resource boxes you need to create: a text resource box and an HTML resource box. The text resource box is plain text, something you could write in a text editor like Notepad. Text resources boxes are no more than 250 to 300 characters long. You create this resource box for sites that only accept a text resource box.

In an HTML resource box, links to your sites are made clickable. This means that when readers click on the link, it will take them to your website. You will need to write a small piece of code to create an HTML resource box. An HTML resource box is no longer than 500 characters.

What do you include in your resource box?

1. Establish your knowledge of the topic in some way. Tell others you have more information on your site. If you offer an e-book, newsletter, e-course, or some other resource, you can use this.

2. A link or links to your websites. One link to a website is good; two links is even better provided both links are relevant to the topic.

For example, if you own two websites, a hair loss resource and a gardening resource, you don't want to send readers to your gardening site if the article is about hair loss. The purpose of your resource box is to lead your readers to your site. Make the links you include relevant to your topic.

3. Don't give your life history. Unless your article is about child care, potty training, or another topic where it would be relevant, readers don't care about things like how many children you have. Your resource shows others you know what you are talking about. What you say in your resource box must be relevant to your article.

4. Don't include affiliate links in your resource box. You already know not to do this with your article. The same principle applies to your resource box unless the site you are submitting to accepts affiliate links.

If you do include affiliate links, you may be able to bypass this rule by using a redirect page. A redirect page will make the link look like the page is part of your site instead of leading to a different site. Some sites allow this, and others don't. Check the guidelines before submitting.

If all else fails, you'll need to buy a new domain and point it to the affiliate site you are marketing. Your best bet is to simply build a content site and send readers to it. Point readers to relevant pages within your site that offer more information.

Once you've completed your resource box, the only other element to consider is your keywords. If you chose keywords for your article at the beginning, you've already completed this step.

In our next lesson, it's time to submit your masterpiece to the article directories.

Get the most from your articles. Read the Best Practices Guide to Article Marketing. This guide will help you get the most from your article submission because you'll write articles the article directories want and readers will love.

Ready for the next lesson?

Go to Day 6 - "Submitting Your Article"

Writing the List Article - Article Writing for Affiliates Day 3

Day 3 - Writing the List Article

The list article is the easiest type of article to write. It is a list of related things.

For example:

Top 7 Article Writing Tips for Affiliates
Top 10 Tips for Getting More Business Now
Top 7 Ways to Start a Business

If you use the 8 Minute Article Writing software, each of the steps is clearly laid out for you. You have the ability to "jump around" in the software, add your tips, and then write your explanations.

Before writing your list article, write your title. You need to know how many tips you will need.

We will use the "Top 7 Article Writing Tips for Affiliates" to write an article.

Your first step is to create a list of tips. All of your tips must be related to your topic. In this case, we are writing an article about article writing as it relates specifically to writing articles for affiliates.

For example:

  1. Choose a product.
  2. Create a title.
  3. Write your list of tips.
  4. Write an explanation of each tip.
  5. Write the beginning, conclusion, and summary for your article.
  6. Create a resource box.
  7. Submit your article.

Now that we have a list of tips, we want to write one or two paragraphs to further explain each tip.

***********************

For example:

1. Choose a product.
As an affiliate marketer, you have a large amount of products to choose from to sell. To choose the right product to promote, you want to select a product that solves your potential customers' problems.

You also want to consider the amount of commission you will make, whether or not the product fits your topic, and how you will promote the product.

***********************

Next, go through each of the tips and write one to two paragraphs to explain each tip. Keep your words, sentences, and paragraphs short. Remember, your article only needs to be 400 - 700 words. Keeping your article short and answering your readers' questions will get them to click through to your site.

Don't forget to use your keyword phrase you have chosen throughout the article. Three to five times is enough. This will help you further optimize your article for the search engines.

In the next lesson, we will finish writing the article. Lesson five covers Beginnings, Conclusions, and Summaries.

Get the most from your articles. Read the Best Practices Guide to Article Marketing. This guide will help you get the most from your article submission because you'll write articles the article directories want and readers will love.

Ready for the next lesson?

Go to Day 4 - "Summaries, Beginnings and Conclusions"

Crafting an Irresistible Title - Article Writing for Affiliates Day 2

Day 2 - Crafting an Irresistible Title for Your Article

How you craft the title of your article is up to you. You can create a swipe file of good titles you have found and model your title after these titles.

Don't copy these titles. If you do, you will have a hard time finding your article in the search engines. You want to make your article title as original as possible.

There are four types of titles we will examine here. You can use these title ideas to help you write your own title. Remember, the purpose of a good title is to get your reader to read your article and click through to your site.

1. The Question

The purpose of the question title is to engage your readers. You want them to get involved in the topic of your article. With all good article titles, you want to present the problem and then the solution. You will elaborate these points in the body of your article.

An example would be:

Are You Losing Your Hair? Avoid These Three Things

2. The Statement

In the statement title, you make a statement of fact. Use a statistic. Be specific.

For example:

27% of Men Are Losing Their Hair...What to Do to Keep Your Hair Without Losing Your Mind

3. The List

The list is a list of related items. It's very similar to the How-To because you use a list of tips.

For example:

Top 7 Small Business Start Up Tips

4. The How-To

With the how-to, you are telling others how to do something. It's like a recipe. You are teaching them how to do one thing.

For example:

How to Double Your Investments in 30 Days

When writing your titles, include your keywords. This will help you with search engine optimization. Keywords are an easy way to optimize your articles for the search engines. Don't overdo it.

Keep a swipe file of your title ideas. With a swipe file, it's easier to avoid writer's block. Write down all of your title ideas and review them when you want to write a new article. It will make it easier for you to get started writing your article and stay on track.

If you haven't downloaded the 8 Minute Article Writer software, do so now. This software will make it much easier for you to write your article. Download it here.

We also recommend you browse Article Marketer University for additional help, including Maria Marsala's audio, "The 8 Minute Article."

You may also want to listen to Ewen Chia's Affiliate Article Mastery for more tips on making the most of your articles.

In the next lesson, we will examine the easiest type of article to write.

Writing Tools Recommendation

Stylewritter plain english writing software can help you improve your article writing skill.

Whitesmoke 2009 english grammar software is the best grammar & spelling check software for ESL

Ready for the next lesson?

Go to Day 3 - "Writing the List Article"

How to choosing your topic - article writing for affiliates day 1

Day 1 - Choosing Your Topic

Whether you are new to affiliate business or you have been around for a while, you probably already know what topics you will use to choose the products you sell. These same topics can be used to write your articles.

We covered keyword research in the main affiliate marketing course. For those who haven't read that course yet, we will briefly touch on keyword research here.

First, you need to choose about three general topics in which you are interested. If you choose more than three topics, you may want to consider writing under different pen names. You are less likely to be taken seriously by readers if are considered a know-it-all on too many topics.

Since you are selling affiliate products, you have a wide range of choices for products as well as for topics.

If you aren't sure what you want to sell, there are plenty of resources to help you find topics and products to write about. Here are three:

  1. Lycos Top 50 - The Lycos Top 50 will tell you what is getting the most buzz each week.
  2. eBay Pulse - Offers a list of the hottest selling products on eBay.
  3. Yahoo Buzz - The latest news by category.

If you already know what topics you are interested in, you can go to your favorite search engine and research those topics.

To help you find out what others are searching for, you can use tools like:

Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool

SEOBook Keyword Research Tool

Keyword Discovery Keyword Research Tool

WordTracker Keyword Research Tool

Compile a list of keyword phrases. Using these keyword phrases to write your articles will help you rank well in the search engines.

Checklist

  1. Choose at least one product to market.
  2. Choose at least one topic to write about.
  3. Create a list of keywords to use in your article writing campaign.

Our next lesson is about creating your title. The title is one of the most important elements of your article because it tells the reader within seconds whether or not they should read your article.

Article Writing Tools Recommendation

Stylewritter plain english writing software can help you improve your article writing skill.

Whitesmoke 2009 english grammar software is the best grammar & spelling check software for ESL

Ready for the next lesson?

Go to Day 2 - "Crafting a Title"

Article writing for affiliates: 7 days mini course

In this seven-day course you'll learn how to write unique, interesting articles that get widely distributed and build those backlinks. Writing those articles is easy when you follow this step-by-step system.

Table of Contents

Introduction to Article Writing for Affiliates

Internet marketer Travis Sago calls it "bum marketing". Whatever you decide to call it, writing articles to promote affiliate programs is one of the most effective ways to promote affiliate programs. In fact, it's one of the best ways to promote any product or service.

There are several reasons article writing is superior to other methods of promotion:

  1. You don't have to know anyone to create an effective promotion.
  2. You don't have to know search engine optimization, although learning how to research keywords helps.
  3. Article writing is more viral than most other methods of promotion. Write a good article on your topic, and it will promote the product for you for years.
  4. It is an easy marketing technique to automate. Write an article a day or a couple of articles a week, submit them, and Article Marketer's automated submission takes care of the rest.
  5. You are building value into your product. By providing helpful information to your potential customers, you influence their buying decisions. They are more likely to buy from you than someone who just posted an ad.
  6. You don't need a website. Although it is easier to market affiliate programs with one, you can improvise. You can easily create a free blog or Squidoo lens to promote your affiliate products.
  7. You don't have to be a writer or a copywriter to write great articles. Writing great articles is about sharing information with your reader in a conversational manner.

Anyone can write an article. Knowing something about your topic certainly helps. For those who don't know how to write an article, this course will teach you.

In the next lesson, you'll learn how to choose an appropriate topic for your article.

Ready to get started?

Start with Day 1 - "Choosing Your Topic"