This is a follow-up to my original post “I earn $12,000/month – Let me show you how I do it” and "I earn $12,000/month – Let me show you how I do it/".

You should read them before continuing because I am doing this in a series to help you earn as much or more than myself. My next article will be on how you can organize your website so it not only ranks but converts.

Our next step in research is competitive and keyword research. Before researching your competition or the keywords people are using, you're flying blind.

We worked with ceiling tiles in the previous article, so I'll keep the theme the same.

Starting with Google Keyword Planner

Google used to give you all this information for free. Unfortunately, they're not anymore. You have to pay to get this data. By paying, I mean have at least one running campaign. There is a workaround. I'll show you below (you still have to pay. Just not a crazy amount).

I am going to assume that you have a Google account. Go to https://adwords.google.com and log in with that same account:

Log in to Google Adwords
Go through the process of creating your first ad
Set the daily budget to $5/day

Once you have your data, you can pause the campaign and stop paying.

There are other ways to get this information, SEMrush is one of them. Let's look at "decorative ceiling tiles":

You simply put in your keywords and it spits out everything you need to know without a Google account. They have a bunch of other tools you can't live without. I would pay the $99/month. Again, if you would like, I can help you all and export this for you from my account.

Chasing a dragon

Don't chase a keyword that's out of reach or a keyword that's very hard to rank for. Try to hit the sweet spot with long tail keywords. What are long tail keywords? They're keywords that are longer than two words. A great keyword that's searched 110/month is "decorative acoustic ceiling tiles".

Start with your primary keywords on your homepage and category pages. Drill down to specific keywords on individual product pages.

Keyword difficulty

Both SEMrush and Ahrefs tell you how difficult a keyword is. I love Ahrefs because they give you a lot of details like how many links you need to get in order to rank a "well" built page/website.

It looks like decorative ceiling tiles is not that bad eh? Hints anyone?

Organizing your keywords

Don't just look at your keywords and work on the fly. You need to have them in an excel sheet. I'll do you a favour and share a Google doc with what you're research should look like. Here's the link. I didn't put search volume in there. I'll leave that to you.

Your goal is to get to your keywords easily when you're building the information architecture of you website. Here's what I have in Google Drive:

I can't stress this enough. You might hire multiple contractors. Without being organized, you're wasting money since they'll guess. You don't want that.

Here's a list of free tools to get you started:

http://answerthepublic.com/
http://lsigraph.com/
https://ubersuggest.io/

Final Thoughts

I've now helped you pick an affiliate and research keywords. If everything looks good, you'll need to move on to information architecture and structure of your new affiliate website. That will be my next topic.

Let me know if you have any questions. I'll do my best to help you all.