So what is a keyword and why do you want to write about them? Well, if you want to go back to your English classes, a keyword is basically a noun. If you want to write about shoes then guess what? The word shoes is your keyword. Is it a good keyword? Probably not...it’s too generic. Anyone looking for shoes probably is just doing some random searching; they probably just looking for ideas. The thing that you need to understand about keywords is that the more specific they are, the more likely the traffic you get to your site will be enticed to click on an ad and help you to earn extra cash writing.
Keeping this in mind, you wouldn’t want to write about shoes – you want to be more specific so try again. How about “blue shoes”? That’s a little bit better, you’re narrowing down the focus significantly and possibly alienating all the people out there that hate the colour blue at the same time, but that’s okay. Still, we can narrow that word down even more – how about blue suede shoes? Now you’ve just created a laser-focused keyword – people looking for blue suede shoes (the Elvis Presley song not withstanding) will find your site if you mention that keyword enough times while writing. If you use the keyword consistently in your post and your post title, not only will people be able to find you from the major search engines, your ads will also match the keywords in your written text and you can earn extra cash.
Whoa – wait a second, what ads? You need to put ads on your site if you want to earn extra cash writing – it’s the simplest way. You don’t have to sell anything, all you have to do is write using your specific keywords, copy and paste in the code (or add the widget in Blogger) and you’ll have ads geared to the content on your page. The main companies doing this are Google and Yahoo. When people visit your site and click on the ads, you get paid. The amount may vary from click to click, and some feel that Yahoo pays more than Google.
You won’t get paid a lot per click, depending on your topic and keyword you can earn anywhere from .25 to 2.00 or more for a single click. While that doesn’t sound like much, there are two things to consider:
1. Any article you write continues to earn money for months or years afterward
2. The more traffic that visits your site, the more money you make
Getting traffic is key, because the amount of people that click on ads online (click-through) is generally pretty low, anywhere from .5 to 4 percent. I’ve read of some people that get up to 12 percent click-through, but that is rare, so don’t set your hopes too high. The way you get traffic is what we’ve already discussed with this article, writing original content using focused keywords. Ideally the keywords will involve something that you know about and have passion for. That will make it easier for you to produce content. The other part of the equation is back-links – links from other websites that point to your article.
If you have a targeted back-link from a high ranked page in Google, you can start getting more traffic over night. If you use search engine optimization, your pages will gradually rank higher. The more content you create and the more back-links you generate, the more the search engines will find you and rank you higher in the search engine results – meaning that people will find you easier. Instead of having 10 or less people visit your site, you can have thousands in a single day. If even a small percentage of them click on your ads you’ll be on your way to earn extra cash.
Before I talk briefly about how to choose a keyword, let me give you a quick tip on how to count keywords. See, if you had to go back through your post and find every occurrence of the words earn extra cash on this page, it would be a bit of a hassle. However, if you use MS word like I do, you can use the “Find” feature to give you the number easily. Check out this screen shot.
In the screen shot you can see that Word found 4 incidents of the keyword. If you had a total of 100 words in the article your keyword percentage would equal 4 percent, which is decent without being spammy (spam or keyword stuffing happens with 6-7 percent or more). You can use Word to also tell you how many words are in your post – take you keyword count (4) and divide it by your total word count (100) to get the percentage (.04 or 4 percent).
I find it pretty hard to get beyond 4 percent keyword saturation, but I also care about what I write about. A decent rule of thumb if you don’t want to over-think how often to work your keyword into your post is the try to squeeze it in once ever paragraph. As long as your paragraphs are three or four lines long you should be able to rate high enough for your keyword without being flagged as spam.
That is the consequence of ‘keyword stuffing’, you’ll be flagged by search engines like Google as being spam, and you will drop or be black listed right out of the search results. You don’t want this to happen to you because you won’t have a chance to earn extra cash writing, nobody will ever be able to find you – so nobody will click your ads.
Choosing profitable keywords
There is a bit of a science to doing this, and I don’t pretend to be an expert, but here are a few good tips to use when narrowing down which keyword(s) to use to earn extra cash writing:
· Minimum 200 searches per day
· No more than 400,000 competing pages (less is better)
· There are ads for the word
You need to know how many searches are happening for a term to be able to earn extra cash writing. To do this you used to have to either buy or subscribe to special software, now Google shows you how with their keyword tool. It also lets you see an average Cost Per Click (CPC) price (what you get paid is usually much lower) which is another useful tool for determining the keyword worth. Lastly, Google also gives you an idea of how much competition there is for a keyword – the more competition, the more ads and the more profitable the keyword is likely to be.
To find out how many competing pages are out there, go to Google and type in your keyword with quotation marks around it. So if my keyword was blue suede shoes I’d type it with quotes “blue suede shoes” in the Google search – the search results will show only the pages online that have these specific words in the same order. If you type the keyword twice, once with brackets and once without you should notice a big drop in the results with the quotes added on. You don’t want too many competitors when you’re starting out, because it’s easy to get discouraged and give up before you’ve begun to earn extra cash writing. Starting with only 400,000 competitors is fine for starters, once you have a firm grasp of how all of this works you can set your site on more profitable keywords that have greater competition.
Lastly, to check for ads for your keyword is to merely look over on the right hand side of the page when Google returns your search for your keyword. If there are any ads for the keyword you’re researching, they’ll appear on the right hand side of the screen. Generally, the more ads that are there the better your chances are to make money.
This post is starting to get pretty long, so we’ll leave it at that for today. There are more things to discuss in regards to keywords, namely long tail keywords – but I’ll leave that for a different post. There should be enough here to get you started in the right direction to research keywords and begin to earn extra cash writing.
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