Keyword Research Can Help You Make Money From Your Blog — Copyblogger

Money? Blog? Do those two words really go together?

Sure they do.

Your blog might not propel you to the cover of Forbes, but almostanyone can make a healthy income from blogging. You just have toapproach it with the same diligence and work ethic as everything else.

It also helped to start thinking about it in the beginning, insteadof two years later when you realize that you picked an unprofitableniche. If you’re already in that boat, don’t worry—this section willhelp you squeeze a few extra dollars out of your blog.

Once again, it all starts with keyword research.

Researching Products and Services to Review

One of the best ways to make money from your blog is toreview/recommend products and services that are relevant to youraudience. Not only will your readers be predisposed toward trustingyour recommendations, but search engines like Google also tend to rankreviews from authority blogs highly.

The result? You earn a constant stream of affiliate commissions from the products and services that you review.

In the long run, promoting products and services for a commission isprobably the best way to build a sustainable income from blogging.Instead of just taking a nominal fee for letting someone advertise onyour blog, you can take a cut of the profits for yourself. Thedifference can be huge, especially if you stick with it for severalyears.

For my friend’s mixed martial arts blog, we have lots ofopportunities to sell related products. Several of the top keywordresults for “mma” are related to gear that all fighters have to buy,including gloves, shorts, and other apparel.

Using Keyword Discovery’s research tool, let’s take a look at the first few “mma gloves” keyword:

Do you see the opportunity here?

Just from this one keyword, we have a list of different types ofgloves that MMA fighters want to buy. My friend could review andpromote these products as an affiliate, collecting a small commissioneach time one of his readers bought the product.

I’m not sure if it would be the best affiliate program, but afterdoing a quick search on Amazon for “mma gloves,” it appears that wecould make some money by promoting them through its affiliate program:

From what I understand, Amazon pays a maximum of 8% on such items,depending on your sales volume. So if my friend was able to sell a lotof different merchandise, he could earn about $1-$4 per sale, just onthe gloves. Add in all of the other products, and he’d have quite a fewsources of income.

In time, it would also be fairly steady. Every time my friendreviews a new MMA product, he’ll probably receive a nice little boostin sales, but search engines might also begin to rank his reviews. Ifthe above numbers are correct, I’m guessing he would get somewherearound 2000 visitors a month on all of the glove reviews combined. Ifhe converts 10% (which is possible for targeted traffic), that’s 200sales a month.

At an average of two dollars per sale, that’s $400 per month ofincome from just one product category. Add in all of the other productsthat fighters need, including consumables like nutritional supplements,and he could easily build an income of a few thousand dollars a month.

Researching Keywords with a High CPC

But there’s also another approach.

If you put ads on your site, programs like Google’s Adsense will payyou every time someone clicks on one of them. The trick is making surethey show ads that:

• Are relevant and interesting to your audience
• Have a high cost per click (CPC), earning you a respectable profit for every click

It’s a complicated subject, but you can maximize both the relevanceof the ads and the CPC by targeting certain keywords with your content.Google even has a feature called “Selection Targeting” that allows youto focus it on a certain set of keywords.

Of course, to do that, you’ll need to know which keywords are profitable… which brings us right back to keyword research.

Unfortunately, figuring out the profitability of a term is prettytough. At best, all you can do is research a series of terms and makean educated guess on which ones you should target with your posts. Thenyou can fine-tune as you start receiving results.

For our mixed martial arts blog, Adsense ads probably aren’t thebest way to monetize, but I’ll run through an example anyway. UsingKeyword Discovery’s research tool, I pulled up the top 100 termscontaining “mma,” “ufc,” “boxing,” “karate,” and “kickboxing,” and Iadded them into a single list, totaling 500 keywords.

Next, I copied and pasted them into a test Google Adwords campaign,pretending like I wanted to become the highest bidder for all 500terms.

Then I plugged those terms into the traffic estimator, bringing upthe estimated CPC for each word. By sorting according to the CPC, wecan see which terms might be the most appropriate to target with ourAdsense ads.

As you can see, most of the profitable keywords like “kickboxinggloves,” “karate uniforms,” and other types of gear are the mostprofitable. You can optimize reviews for those keywords, or you couldjust become an affiliate yourself, which is why I said Adsense isprobably not the best strategy for this niche.

There are a few terms that might work very well, though. Forinstance, you might not be able to become an affiliate for “ufctickets” or “orange county kickboxing.” You could, however, write postsabout both of those topics and select those keywords for your ads.

Keyword Research Tools Are Essential

What’s the bottom line?

If you’re planning to make money from your blog, keyword research toolsare essential. They help you determine how to best monetize yourtraffic, as well as how to optimize your posts to help you bring in themost revenue.

You may have noticed that I’ve used several different keywordresearch tools in this series. That’s because each has differentstrengths. You can get the same data from all of them, but some are alittle better at some things than others.

Many of the top affiliate marketers and Adsense experts subscribe toall of them, just to make sure they have the best data possible. Overthe long term, small differences in the quality of your research canhave huge impacts on your traffic and revenue.

If you’d like to learn more, I’ve prepared a primer that goesthrough some of the most important questions about keyword researchtools. And it’s all in the next section.

Next: A Primer on Keyword Research Tools

Back to Keyword Research for Bloggers.