Sorry I am doing a lot of talking about software – and mostly they don’t even have affiliate programs – aren’t I a bad Internet marketer! At the end of the day though you need to the right tools to earn passive income online.
I don’t know about you but my biggest technical challenge with Internet marketing, aside from the whole “I’m a marketer” mind shift was figuring it out what a profitable keyword is. I’d say its still my major issue!
Its confusing – I start with a good idea – I create 1000’s of associated keywords with Keyword Elite and then try to figure out whether I can take on the competition in SEO Elite. Although these tools are incredibly powerful they also have a couple of disadvantages:
- They are slow – and quiet often my IP gets banned from Yahoo or Google for a while – so I have to stop and start again the next day;
- There is no obvious workflow – step-by-step procedure if you like. The software’s videos are useless and the best I’ve seen on how to actually use it are Vic’s videos on Bloggerunleashed
Market Samurai has been around since last August (?) and is still in Beta – not all the modules are available yet – but what is I am liking a lot! What do I like about Market Samurai?
A built in WorkFlow for Identifying Profitable Keywords
The way I am using Market Samurai at the moment is:
- Keyword analysis: you seed a phrase and it generate options
- Filter out the obviously unsuitable phrases and the ones that get not traffic and export the rest to a spreadsheet
- Analysis each remaining phrase to see what the competition is.
- Categorise my spreadsheet with the high priority (low competition, high profitability) and the medium (medium competition, higher profitability)
Pretty much I am using the approach described in the videos below by Market Samurai’s creators. I’ve linked the introduction video plus the three detailed follow ups. They are quite long and detailed but I found them clear. You may want to take notes to get your head around it. They also mention the free tools you can use to do a similar, but far more labour-intensive analysis, so its useful to see these even if you can’t afford the software.
The First Golden Rule: Target Keywords With Traffic
The Second Golden Rule: Target Profitable Keywords
The Third Golden Rule: Target Keywords With Low Competition
I am finding this a really useful approach – and in fact I’m going back through my existing sites and realising that I had made two key mistakes:
- Chosen keywords with no traffic
- Chosen keywords with no buying traffic.
Like DUH! For example I OWN the search term “internet marketing HubPages” – I dominate the e-book scammers, for which I am very happy! However I now know they weren’t making any money – because #1 position gets about 1 searcher a day!
Pricing and Free Use Period
You can try it risk free – by downloading the fully functional software (the module that’s aren’t available aren’t available in the paid version either) you have 40 days to decide whether to pay for it. N.B. the site says 12 day trial – but have a 40 day count down – so beware that you may only have 12 days to make a decision – can someone leave a comment if that happens to them.
The price is $147 which will no doubt go up in the future – to a subscription model I suspect. If you like it make sure you buy it at the current price before the rest of the modules were released 🙂 Regretably there is no affiliate program yet!
I’d love to hear your comments pro/con this software or anything else that makes it easy to find that elusive buying keyword!
You might want to check out my Free On-Page SEO Series too – starting with What Are My Keywords?