My affiliate marketing guide for you part 4

This article from the Affiliate Marketing Guide is going to take you through the importance of keywords, and how to develop a strategy that will optimise everything you do to ensure that you are attracting as much free traffic from the search engines as possible.Let me say first of all, that, starting out the whole concept around keywords seems like a black science – at least that is what it seemed to me! However, once you get it clear in your head then it is simply a matter of following a process!Very simply put, keywords are those words or phrases (also known as long tail keywords) that people type into search engines on the internet to find some answers to questions they have. The challenge is to find those keywords that you are going to focus on to get yourself on the first page of the search engines, be it Google, Yahoo or Bing, which is where you want to be.So, what are the steps to finding the right keywords, and once found, what do you do next?
Find keywords. One truism I am sharing with you on this – there is no substitute for continuous digging and hard work to determine your keywords. You simply have to put the time and effort into finding the right keywords for you. There are tools that can help you enormously in this exercise. For example, Google Keyword Tool is a fantastic resource and it is free! This will help you find out how many searches are made for those keywords on a monthly basis which helps you determine how big the market is for those words or phrases. But, be warned, the more popular a keyword is, the more competition you will face to get ranking on the search engines. There are other tools that can help you dig deeper and get a better understand of the competiveness or otherwise of these keywords. Tools like Wordtracker or Market Samurai, and there are others, are really good for this type of work, but you will have to pay for them. You can get them on a free weekly trial to have a look at to see which you like best, but after that you will be paying. This is just grunt work that has to be done and there is no quick solution. However, done properly and it is giving you a great foundation for your business.
Select your keywords. Once you have completed this exercise then select, say, the first 10 keywords that you are going to work on. The reason I say 10 is that you want to have a number that you are working on simultaneously so that you are driving traffic to your site, or blog, from as many different places as you can. Also, 10 is a relatively comfortable number to do a really good job on before you move on to the next batch. You will end up with a long list of keywords, but tackle them in blocks of 10 to make it manageable.
Develop a strategy. Once you have your list you now need to have a clear strategy and plan as to how you are going to approach this part of your business. You will hear me say this time and time again in the Affiliate Marketing Guide that maximising the opportunity that using the correct keywords offers, is a critical element in the establishment and growth of your business. So, what should be included in your strategy? The first and, to me, the easiest approach to this is to ask – how am I going to communicate with my audience? If the answer is, for example, my website, my blog, articles, videos, social media, then I must have a clear strategy for each of those and they must interlink. So, how am I going to integrate all these routes to market into one clear plan? The answer to that question will give you the strategy that is right for you.That’s it for Part 4 of the Affiliate Marketing Guide. I am writing these articles in separate parts with 3 clear action steps in each article to enable you to build your business brick by brick rather than giving it to you all in one document, that is more likely to result in overwhelm!