Picking a Buying Keyword for Your Affiliate Site

Hey guys, Dante here.

So today I figured it would be very helpful to anybody who is truggling with their affiliate business to talk about keyword research. There is no doubt about it. Targeting a keyword for your affiliate site to rank high for is the base of your whole site and every site you build unless you decide to get traffic through some other way which is difficult.

So in this post I will walk you through the whole process I do to find great buying keywords for my affiliate sites. Then I will touch on how to use keywords in your site to rank well in the search engines.

Ok so the first thing I do in this affiliate strategy is I go to the keyword tool in google. I never found the need to buy expensive keyword tools because I have already found great success with keeping things as simple as I can when building up some new affiliate sites. I always make sure I have a market and a clickbank product in mind which I will get into in another post.

But once I get to the keyword tool I will type in a broad keyword. The first thing I think of when I think of a big market. For an example I will type in "build muscle". Now right away I get a ton of great keywords that are getting searched for every month. So I simply pick one of these that will be more specific.

So for the example I will choose "how to build muscle" as my affiliate keyword and type that into the search box. Then I find one at the very top that is more specific which is "how to build lean muscle". This is a good keyword as far as the volume goes considering it has over 2,000 searches a month.

I always aim for a keyword that gets a least 2,000 searches every month. There are other important guidelines to consider as well. For one you should take the affiliate keyword you have in mind and type that into the google search box inside quotation marks. This shows how many pages are ranking for that exact term.

For the example it shows that there are just over 400,000 pages ranked for that exact term. Now so many marketers will tell you to make sure it has no more than 10,000 or something rediculously low like that. But I do not do it like other affiliate marketers. I generally go for anything that I think is specific enough and close to the buying stage. This affiliate term is close enough so I know that I can squeeze some sweet money out of it.

But if you want to go by numbers then my range does not extend past 700,000 search results. The way you should really analyze the competition is by taking the keyword out of quotes and searching for it. Then visit each one of the top ranked sites that could very well be affiliate sites.

Then you look over each one. Now if there are a bunch of authority sites like wikipedia or sites that do not have the keyword in the domain name but only as the title of the page then it will be hard to outrank them. That is because those guys have a bunch of high quality backlinks that gives them exclusive rights to the top rankings.

But most of the time there are not many quality sites like that. If you see something like a forum question like for yahoo answers then that is a great sign that you can outrank them for the keyword. I would generally go for the affiliate keyword if there was no more than three authority sites in the top five results of google.