CPA Offer – Keyword Research

Here is the part 3 of my Promote CPA offers series. In case you have missed, you can read the previous parts here:

• How to Promote CPA Offers – Introduction & Getting accepted by CPA Networks
• Promote CPA Offers – Choosing Offers

If you have missed downloading your free videos on promoting CPA offers, you can download free CPA videos and ebook here.

Keyword research is as important with promoting CPA offers as with any other niche. Keyword research can make or break your CPA campaigns. If you have been in affiliate marketing, you will probably be aware of the keyword research techniques. So, how do you do your keyword research?

Depending on what CPA offer you chose to promote, there are many ways you can find some good keywords. Here are few techniques which I use to build my keyword list:

1. Google Keyword Tool

Google Keyword Tool may seem to be one of the simplest ways to do a keyword research. Many of you must have already used this tool. I like Google’s keyword tool because of a simple fact that the tool comes from google and there cannot be anyone else other than google to tell you the demand for a keyword. Although the tool is not accurate, it does give us a fair indication of the keyword demand.

Apart from the normal keyword research, you can also use the website description to get related keywords. You can put the CPA offer or your landing page address in the website description & let Google tell you the keywords that it thinks are appropriate with the landing page. If Google does not return the keywords you had planned for, then it may be an indication that your PPC campaigns may be hit with a poor quality score.

2. Ask.com

Ask.com is another good search engine to look for related keywords. You can look for the related keywords suggested by Ask.com. You can even click on the related searches keywords and get more keywords.

You will be able to build a really nice list just looking at the related searches at ask.com

3. MSN
Like Ask.com, msn.com also provides you the related searches. Use this to build your keyword list.

4. Domain names

The domain name technique can be used if the CPA offer is related to a popular merchant. There are tons of email & zip submits where the giveways are expensive products. You can use the domain variations for the products to build good keyword list.

Another domain technique is to build your keyword list based on the domains related to your offer. e.g. if your offer is about free plasma, you can build the keyword list using variations of the free plasma. So you may get the following keywords in your list.

http://freeplasma

freeplasma com
www freeplasma
www.freeplasma.com
freeplasma net

you get the idea, right?

5. Quantcast

Quantcast.com can be really useful arsenal in building keyword lists. Quantcast provides lot of information about sites including demographics of visitors, related sites etc. I don’t know where they get their demographics information but it does help in overall strategy of promoting offers.

Quantcast not only provides the demographics of the users but also provides valuable information like the other related sites. As shown in above image, the section “Audience Also Visits” shows people visiting adidas.com also visit the sites marked. You can use this information to build additional keyword list using the domain technique.

You can also use keyword tools like Keyword Elite (if you have some cash to spare). But using the free methods will also result in a pretty good keyword list.

Some gurus recommend using hundreds of keywords in your adgroup while some recommend using singly keyword in the adgroup. Having a single keyword in the adgroup will definitely help in ensuring the keyword is relevant to the ad, but creating dedicated adgroups & ads for so many keywords will be virtually impossible. It will totally depend on whether you are comfortable creating seperate adgroups or not. I would recommend, using max 20 keywords in a adgroup as suggested by Google. Just ensure these keywords are related & relevant to the ads.

Hope this post was helpful to you guys. Next post, I shall also post the keyword list and the ads built around those keywords to give you an idea on ad building.