Great News!
You are one keyword away from making a living online

Over the years I’ve learned to appreciate the power of ranking for even one simple keyword in the search engines.

If you’ve read my story, you know that one of my experiences with making money online is a niche web business I ran through college.  What you don’t know is that I discovered there was only one single keyword that provided nearly every sale, and inspired this post.

What’s interesting and maybe a bit strange is that it didn’t matter that I got thousands of other searches every single month.

As sales came in, it was almost always my magic keyword.

This reality is both exciting, and dangerous.

It is incredible once you get that ranking, and suddenly sales start pouring in.  However, it’s tragic if you should never find your ideal keyword or waste time chasing and optimizing for bad ones.

Today we are going to look at how you can find, and leverage your “golden” keyword as I share the story of my own.

My website is a very large web “store”.   You can click around and browse different items and either order something or leave.  The items for purchase are of a very narrow category in a large niche market.  There’s nothing particularly special about it, except that it’s made a ton of sales.

If you’d like to do the same, pay close attention and I’ll share my sage advice to help you find your way online.

Step 1 – Product + Market:

You have to pick what you’re trying to sell, and have a vague idea of who’s buying.  Most people labor over this a little too much and end up doing nothing.  That’s bad.  Don’t do that!  I know it can be overwhelming as the selection of available products is nearly endless.  My best advice is to find something you can get excited about, and doesn’t require a lot of complications to sell.

I learned this the hard way. 

My older site is kind of a pain in the a**  because it’s a physical product I have to ship out.  I can’t really complain too much because it still makes sales now, and I do absolutely zero promotion or work on it.  In fact, my email just dinged with another order as I’m writing this.  There are worse problems than picking a market or product you don’t like, so don’t sweat it too much.

Use Google Keyword Tool, get out there and try something.  If you can think it, someone is out there searching and buying it right now.

To start using the tool check exact search to see the exact phrases used.  Otherwise you’ll get data that’s not entirely specific to that exact phrase.

Type something and see what comes out the other side.  Like so…

Once you have a good list you’ll want to download them and save for a rainy day.

Step 2 – Who, What, Where, and Sometimes Why?

This step is entirely free, and will do wonders for your web business.  It is the magic power in the process and should NOT be skipped for any reason whatsoever.

No excuses.  Do this!

With your product and website active it’s time to start spying.  We want to know absolutely everything we can learn about what is happening on the site.  What do people type in to get to your page?  Where do they go once they are on the site?  How long do they stay there?  The list goes on, but the point is to leave no stone unturned.

Here’s how we get into the good stuff.

Hop on over to Google Analytics, and or GetClicky.  While you’re at it, signup your site for Google Webmaster tools.

Once registered, you’ll need to put some code into your website so that you are able to receive data.

Usually it will be something like this…

It will take time before you get valid data from Google, but GetClicky is a resource that provides real time tracking information.

Now, while you wait on Google it’s time to setup the most critical part of the process.

You’ll want to edit your account from the account settings page, and once inside you’ll see a place for adding goals.  This is where you add all your desired goal steps.

But wait what are goals, and steps?

Quite simply, you always want the visitor to do something, right?  This is where we define what that something is going to be, and how to measure it.

For example, opt-in might be a goal on one page of the site.

Google is not really that smart, and has no idea what an opt-in means.  You would need to add information regarding which pages and events you should be tracking.   When a visitor goes from the opt-in page, and then to the thank you or download page, they have obviously opted into your list.  Once those pages are linked as a path goal, Google Analytics knows to keep track of how many successfully transfer from that page to the next.

It’s basically just measuring movement between parts of your site, but by naming them and organizing the action flow, you can learn a lot of information.

Of course, another must have goal is sales.  You’ll want to “map” the path through the checkout process.  Where does the order form start, and where does the visitor land after a sale.  This way you can see how many make it to checkout (or order form), and then ultimately how many get through and actually make a purchase.

The best part about goals and analytics is that once you have it setup you can then see which keywords are doing the most damage, and which are lame ducks.

This should be very exciting news, because it can make you the most money!

Step 3 – Sneaky FREE Traffic

This will NOT be an in-depth discussion of all the ways to drive traffic.

I will share one method I have used to find “magic” keywords and all with free traffic.

If you didn’t know already, Google frequently hands out $25 – $100 new account coupons to encourage advertisers to signup and spend money in Adwords.  If you have a physical address registered with them, and have not setup an Adwords account, or have left one dormant you’ll get one in the mail eventually.

I used this “free trial” to drop a big keyword list into Adwords that I might not have used otherwise.  After a period of time I simply checked my stats to see what turned the most sales, and turned off the duds.

Pro-tip: Make sure you set your daily budget equal or below the coupon value, and lower it each day accordingly based on the previous days expenditure.  If you set your budget at $100 for example, spend $20, then the next day you’ll want to put your max daily limit at $80.

WARNING: In general, I don’t recommend Adwords for beginners.  Study it very carefully before making a live campaign.

You’ll also need to pay close attention to this next step.

Using Adwords at least initially is the most time efficient way to find your golden keyword, although you will have to potentially invest some money above the coupon to really get great data.

I usually start with a broad search phrase instead of “exact” that way you might find a few surprise keyword phrases people are typing that didn’t show up in the keyword tool step.

For example, you might start with “dog bowl” and discover that “red dog bowl” or some other component shares the same phrase but has more specific information.

Step 4 – Time and review

The best data is always statistically significant.

That is to say, you’ll need to let some time (and clicks/opt-ins/sales/etc…) pass before making any rush decisions.  Measuring after only one sale ain’t gonna cut it pal…

Give the most attention to this stage of the game as it will be the single most effective weapon.  I’ve watched campaigns go from $10 profits days to $500 just by cutting out duds and optimizing the golden keyword.

Listen closely because there’s a trick to it too.

When enough events have occurred, you’ll want to look at your keyword data inside your Analytics account.

You’ll notice that along with keywords, there is a goals tab.

As you click on that, notice that the display inside Analytics shows goal conversion as a percentage.  One of my goals is how many people go from the store to the checkout process.  This is the percentage I’m referring to, and currently labeled “Checkout” in my particular account.

Well this number is actually misleading for our purposes.

We want to arrange by how many actions happened, not keywords searched or percent converted.  Strangely they don’t include that column.

Here’s the solution.

Simply multiply the number of visits times the percentage, then divide by 100.

Alternately, I prefer to do this with a spreadsheet program like excel.

First download this data, by clicking export near the top of the window.  Usually you’ll want that in CSV format to work with a spreadsheet program.

Once you have the list, clear everything you don’t want beside the keyword and percentage.  If those two were in columns one and two, then in a blank third column add the following equation

=(a1*b1)/100

or a2*b2 for example if it starts one row down, or b1*c1 if it’s one column over.

That simply multiplies the first column by the second and divides the whole thing by 100 since the number originally brought in from your Analytics account is a percentage.

Then you can click on the bottom right corner of that field and drag it straight down to apply the formula to all the remaining rows.

Afterwards you are left with a nice column that shows the exact number of goals achieved.

Sort out the best performing keywords, and it will be like pulling gold out of a mound of dirt.

From this stage you can start to focus on those exclusively in your Adwords account or begin your SEO efforts to conquer those rankings.

That my friends is exactly how I found my golden keyword that has produced over $79,000, and keeps on generating revenues for me today.

Similar Posts:

• How to Use Adwords Editor for Keyword Grouping
• Google Search-Based Keyword Tool
• Perpetual Traffic Formula Creator Releases Cherry Picker Software
• How One Simple Test Optimized My Site & Added $606.71 This Month
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Tagged as: free traffic, Internet Marketing, keywords, Make Money Online, marketing strategy, Search Engine Optimization