As I mentioned earlier, the Google Keyword Tool is one way to help you identify topics through researching interesting keywords. Now I'll walk you through how to use the Keyword Tool to get the best results. It's not just a matter of sitting there thinking up words, but actually using the tool to think them up for you.
However, that's not the only way to really ramp up your potential topic appeal. The #1 way to make your topics appealing to a wide audience is to have a knock-out title. Yes, that's right, the first step of identifying topics starts with titles and the search engines weight these heavily in their search engine algorithms. So, while you can use the Keyword Tool to help you locate words to use in your title, to give your articles some Search Engine Optimization (SEO), the real way to make them profitable is to make them grab the reader as well as the search engine.
Finally, even having a good idea of what topics you want to address, you still might have to think up multiple articles for the same topic. That's where a tool called Rack and Write Mixer can help you generate titles from various disjointed phrases and power words that you have thought up. This way, it takes a little less time to brainstorm potential topics and they are targeting all of the elements of good Internet marketing too.
In Depth: Google Keywords
We've talked a little about the Keyword Tool already, but now we will go into the details of how to use this tool to start generating titles that make your topics profitable and optimized for maximum exposure.
Make Audience-Oriented Adjustments
One of the first things you should do is to set up the tool for whatever country and language your major audience happens to be. You can find out what your biggest audience is regionally by checking the administrative panel of your website for the makeup of countries visiting your site. This is important, even for all English language sites because even English is spoken differently around the world. People in the UK will visit a site and see different spellings and instead of realizing that you are an American company, they might think you are just not a very good speller, and thus unprofessional. So, try to suit the tool to the language you want to highlight most.
At the very top of the tool you will see a sentence that says: "Results are tailored to English, United States." There is a link next to that that simply says, "Edit." Choose the link and change the main language and country, if necessary.
Be Descriptive
The tool can search three different ways, based on a keyword or phrase, based on a URL, or based on some content. For this section, we'll concentrate on choosing to search by descriptive words or phrases by making sure that radio button is selected. Next, you want to enter the word or phrase that you've brainstormed to start the process of finding other ideas or words that might work for you. You will need to type in the letters in the captcha facility that keeps spammers off the site, but it doesn't do anything to your search results.
After you get the results back, you can search through the list and look at the competition for the keyword or phrase, the approximate search volume for the month, and the average search volume. In general, what you want to find is a word that has a low level of competition with a high search volume. Of course, that's nearly impossible to find these days as advertisers are very savvy. But, you can at least get a good idea of which ones are worth trying to use. If you use something with a high advertiser's competition value and a high search volume, the odds of being in the top search results are practically non-existent because major players are hogging the traffic on those.
There are other search metrics that you can add to your list after it is generated. You have to use the drop-down box that says, "Choose columns to display" to add other columns. One other column that is great to see in the results list is Estimated Avg. CPC, which gives you an idea of the payout associated with the keyword or phrase in the Google Adwords system. Using low competition words with high CPC values is one way to generate more Google Adwords dollars on your own sites, as SEO articles will cue the Google server to serve up ads related to what's on your page. If it sees high-paying words, the ads served that people can have the opportunity to click are often also high-paying ads.
If you find some additional keywords in the results that lead you to new keywords, don't be afraid to pull them out of the list and run them alone in the Keyword Tool to see what comes up. You will find this helps you to brainstorm different ways to find words for your topic title that are going to bring in traffic and money to your sites.
Analyze Other Websites
Another way to use the Keyword Tool to analyze the keywords being use on another web page. This is a great way to generate keywords off competitor's sites without too much effort. If you know of sites similar to your own that are already doing a great job attracting traffic, then you should use this tool to find out what keywords they are using.
The way you do that is to switch the radio button from descriptive words or phrases to "website content." It will then return a results list that will be sorted in groups by whatever the major keyword or phrase used happens to be. This is a very easy way to get a list of usable keywords, but do realize that keywords campaign change frequently as new trends are identified.
Utilize Preexisting Articles
Maybe you've written articles already, but they're not generating much attention. You can still use the tool to help you optimize the articles and change the titles. All you do is choose the "website content" radio button and use the link under the box for the URL to add your text into a box instead. Then, the tool will go through the topic and suggest keywords to use in it. All you have to do is change some words here and there and add a different title to get these stale articles to become stars in your writing lineup.
Just remember that you can't put duplicate content on your website, or Google will penalize you. It doesn't understand that you wrote the same articles, only that they appear plagiarized because more than one copy shows up. So, be sure to make the new articles sufficiently different so that you aren't penalized by Google, or remove the old copies and replace them with new ones.
Creating Knock-Out Titles
Now that you understand the importance of researching keywords and how to do it, we'll begin to get started creating knock-out titles. The first rule of thumb is that the first three to five words in the title carry the most weight with the search engines. They will determine the success of your article for the most part. So, it's important that they contain some of the keywords and also some power words to the interest of people who are surfing the web. After all, if you just wrote for search engines - let's be honest - no one would want to read your articles. You need something in there to make the titles interesting to readers too!
As with most marketing, the way to sell something is to invoke an emotional response first, followed by a justification for buying into a particular product. The same is true when you are writing to attract attention. You want to create titles that have an emotional draw to them, but also don't forgo the logical reason why someone should take the time to read your writing. And, of course, you have to include the keywords too. It sounds like a lot of work, but it's not!
All you really need is a good Thesaurus. You will take the same old titles you think up and kick them up a notch by finding powerful words that have an emotional effect on your reader. For instance, check out any marketing book and you will see that some words have a higher emotional value than others and sell your products better. These words are things like super, improved, gold, platinum, etc. Well, you can use a Thesaurus to kick-start the brainstorming process to get words in your title that have a more direct emotional appeal. And, try to find action verbs that really engage the reader's senses and makes your title come alive.
If you have the money, you should invest in a very good program called Visual Thesaurus. It not only gives you alternative words for your titles, but also lets you drill down those alternatives to find even more words that might work for you. Eventually, you will start to develop a list of power words that you can use over and over again with great results!
Speed Titling Your Articles
Okay, so now you will have a bunch of keywords or phrases and some idea of alternative words with some emotional punch to them. You know how to set up a title with these to make them draw people in. But, you need to do this with not 1 or 10, but maybe 30 or 50 articles! How do you create multiple article titles and topics so quickly?
Here we come to yet another tool, the Rack and Write Mixer tool. This tool will take three boxes and let you add some keywords, power words, and even the audiences targeted to generate plenty of possibilities for article titles. This tool is located at www.rackandwrite.com/mixer/mixer.html.
There are three fields in the tool, A, B, and C. In field A you can list several different audiences that you think will be interested in your topic. Be specific. Maybe it's new moms, pregnant teenagers, or busy executives. Add as many as 20 different audiences in the first field. In field B, you will put in some of the keywords or phrases that you researched using the Google Keyword Tool. List up to 20 of these in field B. Finally, in field C, you will want to use your power words. You can make them power verbs, nouns, or something else. It doesn't matter, just something to bring in the reader's interest.
Then, you'll hit the "Create Topics" button and sit back and wait for the results. This will a list of article titles very quickly and then you can just choose the ones that work best for your website or client. You can print these out and generate more article titles on the fly by replacing a few words here and there, with keywords or power words that you've researched earlier. You'll get great titles that profitable in no time flat!
The Rack and Writer website has a number of different tools to help facilitate Speed Writing . To get even thousands of potential article topics, you can also use their main Rack and Write tool, located at www.rackandwrite.com . It has a few more fields you need to fill in, but it can generate up to thousands of great titles with as few as nine to eleven well-chosen keywords.