Without profitable keywords, you're not going to make money, no matter how well written your ad is.

Well, in today's lesson, I want to let you in on the 1 TRUE "secret" to finding profitable keywords in the Google Adwords system. I'll take you through a step by step example that will show you what I do to virtually guarantee I find profitable keywords. So, let's get started...

Step 1

This lesson isn't a lesson in product development, so I'm assuming that you already have a product you want to promote. Ok, once we have our product, we need to go to Google and enter some very broad search term related to our product. In this example, let's choose the keyword "keyword research". You can choose any keyword that's related to your product. In this example, my product is a keyword research software program, so I chose the keyword "keyword research".

Step 2

Once we do this, we'll want to pick one or more of the websites that are advertising in the Google Adwords section of Google. You can see above that I've chosen www.WebSEODesign.com

This is the website that I'll be monitoring over the next several weeks. Keep this in mind because it's very important.

The idea here is that the longer a website bids on a keyword, the greater the chance that the keyword is profitable (i.e. It's making them money!)

The same can be said in the "real world" as well... The longer an ad runs in a magazine, tv, or a newspaper, the greater chance it's making the owner money, or he wouldn't keep advertising the same ad.

This information is GOLD and isn't to be taken lightly...

Step 3

The next step is to use a keyword generation software program OR come up with a big list of related keywords yourself. I'd recommend at least using a free keyword tool like the Overture search term suggestion tool (http://www.inventory.overture.com) and entering your main keyword. Personally, I find the free tools don't give me the number of keywords I need, and they also work much slower. I use Keyword Elite to generate bigger lists of keywords... But, like I said, you can still use a free tool and it should work "ok".

I'm assuming you dont' have Keyword Elite yet, so in this example we'll use the Overture search term suggestion tool. If you do have Keyword Elite, use that software instead.

We'll enter the keyword "keyword research" into Overture and click "ok"

You can see that the Overture tool gives us a larger list of keywords we can work with. We'll then need to copy and paste those keywords into an Excel spreadsheet. What we're going to do is we'll go back to Google and "one by one" we're going to see if www.WebSEODesign.com is bidding on any of these keywords.

Take a look at the Excel spreadsheet below to see what I mean...

All we need to do now is go through our list of keywords and manually check Google to see if our website is advertising using each of the keywords. We'll do this once every 1-3 days and update our spreadsheet accordingly.

After at least 3 weeks, we'll then look at our spreadsheet and take those keywords that www.WebSEODesign.com has been bidding on, for the longest period of time... and use those keywords for our own Adwords ad, nearly guaranteeing our chances of also being profitable!

The principle is very simple here. Don't gloss over this... The longer a website is advertising with a keyword, they're either making money with the keyword OR they're extremely stupid and are throwing money away. Chances are, it's the former.

For the longest time, I did the exact steps above manually like I've shown you. It works very well, although it does take a bit of time to manually check each keyword and update your spreadsheet. Especially if you have, say 100 keywords... let alone 1,000!

That's when I got smart, or I guess you could say... lazy.

Earlier I mentioned I use Keyword Elite to generate big keyword lists, well, I also use Keyword Elite to automatically do the process above for me. I don't have to do anything but paste in the URL I want to analyze, and paste in the keywords I want to monitor. Click ok... and Keyword Elite does all this for me :-)

Let's go through the steps using Keyword Elite, for those of you that already own Keyword Elite or if you decide to ever get a copy, you'll know exactly what to do to get tons of profitable keywords quickly.

Using Keyword Elite to get your profitable list of keywords...

Step 1

Open Keyword Elite and select project 5 and click "ok"

Step 2

Click the "new project" button and then enter a project name. We'll just enter a project name titled "keyword research" since that's the name of the main keyword we used to generate our keyword list. The project name can be anything, but should be something you'll remember later. Reason being, you can create as many projects as you want, to track as many keywords and websites as you want...

Step 3

Click the "edit project" button to enter our keywords and URL. We'll enter the website URL: www.keywordsanalyzer.com

and the keywords:

keyword research
keyword ppc research
keyword research tool
highbeam keyword research search web
keyword marketing research
keyword research service
engine keyword ranking research search
keyword research software
keyword research tracking
keyword research seo
highbeam keyword question research save
keyword research services
free keyword research tool
keyword popularity research
article document keyword question research save search
keyword professional research
engine engine keyword research search search tip
free keyword research
instant keyword research
ft keyword lauderdale research

If I were to only use Keyword Elite, I would have generated a keyword list of over 5,000 keywords and then just copied those keywords into project 5, which would only take a couple minutes... but in this example, let's just use this small keyword list that the Overture Search Term suggestion tool created for us.

Click "ok"... and then move to the next step.

Step 4

The next step is to just click the "run now" button and Keyword Elite will then go to Google and will tell us whether the website is bidding on any of those keywords listed. It only take a couple seconds to complete. When finished, the screen will look like this:

Keyword Elite will show you the website you're monitoring, as well as the keyword, The date Keyword Elite checked to see if the website was bidding on the keyword. Whether the website is bidding on the keyword, the number of days the keyword has been found... And it will also list the Title of the ad, the description of the ad, and the actual URL being used in the ad.

On top of that, you can even set Keyword Elite to run on a scheduler at a specified time each day, so you literally have to do nothing once you've input your keywords!

To set it on a scheduler, just click the scheduler button and you'll be prompted through a little wizard asking when you'd like to run Keyword Elite, as shown below:

As you can see, whether you decide to go the manual route, OR the automated route, you'll get the same results... and that is, you'll make money, and better yet... you'll prevent Google from taking your money!

I hope this lesson has provided some insite into what you really need to be doing before you even think about setting up a Google Adwords campaign.

Stay tuned for the next lesson. We're just getting started!

All the best,

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
http://www.keywordelite.com