Writing for Your Wealth

This is Part 4 of the How to Build Passive Income with Article Sites Series, and today we’ll go over how to use keyword research to decide what kind of articles to write on our sites.

Now that we’ve decided our small article site will focus on tennis ball machines, it’s time to figure out what the topics of our individual articles will be. The goal is to make money with each page of our site, so we want to focus on a different keyword term for each article. To make sure each page has the potential to earn money, we need to figure out what terms people are looking up related to our new niche.

Earlier when I used the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, I just typed “tennis ball machines” into the search box. This time, I went out and looked up some of the brands and types of machines and added more words to the search box (i.e. lobster tennis, tutor tennis, battery-powered tennis ball machine).

The Adwords tool is great for brainstorming ideas, but it probably can’t figure out all the related keywords for you. If you put in several terms, you’ll get back a broader range to choose from.

In the picture, we can see that Lobster, Tennis Tutor, and Prince are all brands of machines and get looked up. In all likelihood, their websites are always going to come up first for searches of their specific brand, but if we can come up number 2 or 3, the term still might be worth targeting. After all, the manufacturer’s site doesn’t always (ever) give the most unbiased information, so people often look beyond that when doing research on a product they might buy.

To win with Adsense, we don’t have to promote any particular brand, but as long as people are looking up the information, we can take advantage of it. We can write consumer information articles that share with people how popular these brands are, the machines they offer, the price ranges, etc. Of course, it all depends on your niche, but you may be able to find reviews on Amazon or Epinions that help you get some of this information. And, of course, there is the manufacturers’ own site.

Other terms that came up in my search were “used tennis ball machine,” “portable tennis ball machine,” and “battery powered tennis ball machine.”

It’s worth writing an article for each of these terms.

You could scroll further down, and get more ideas, but we’re already in a pretty narrow niche, so it might not be worth our time to write articles around topics that get significantly fewer searches per month. You could always go back and target those less searched terms later on, when you’re looking to add fresh content to your site, but we might as well start with the more popular terms for our core 15-20 articles or so.

(There are no rules to how many articles you need to write, by the way. I just usually do more than 10 since the original Made for Adsense–MFA–sites tended to be 10-page mini sites, and Google eventually caught on and made it harder to rank with those types of sites.)

Coming up with titles the search engines like and people will click

The titles are what show up as a link when you enter your keywords in the search engines. They also show up in the top of your browser bar when you’re on a page. Basically, the title is your big chance to attract someone to click from the search engine results to your article.

A lot of people who write articles specifically for SEO purposes, often for ecommerce sites, don’t pay a lot of attention to writing good titles. They’ll often have titles that are nothing more than three or four keywords mashed together. Think: “Tennis ball machines, used tennis ball machines, Lobster tennis ball machine…”

I don’t know who clicks on such titles, but it isn’t me.

Since we’re only focusing on one keyword phrase per title, it’s easier for us to craft something a little more appealing. Just think of the types of titles you click when you’re looking for information.

Chances are you start surfing with a question in mind (Would this product be right for me? What brand is best? Where can I find the cheapest model? Will the cheapest model fall apart?), so answering a question in your title is often a good way to go. Also, if you start out giving yourself a question to answer, then it’s often easier to write your article and keep it on track (as opposed to just saying, let’s write an article on tennis ball machines).

Up above we were looking at “used tennis ball machine,” “portable tennis ball machine,” and “battery powered tennis ball machine.” Here are some ideas for article titles that might just get people to click through to your site (keywords in bold):

• How to Buy a Used Tennis Ball Machine Without Getting a Lemon

• Can A Portable Tennis Ball Machine Fit in Your Car?
• Battery Powered Tennis Ball Machine Pros & Cons

I’m not saying they’re brilliant titles (you could probably do better), but they’re at least a little more interesting and informative than simply jamming a bunch of keywords together.

Note: Google, at least, seems to give more weight to pages where the keywords are closer to the beginning of the title. Sometimes it’s hard to put the keyword right up front without creating something awkward, but if you can make it work, try it (i.e. Battery Powered Tennis Ball Machine Pros & Cons”).

Getting the most out of your research time

If you want to write 20 different articles, you could research 20 different things, but I generally end up spending less time on research than you might think. Because all our articles will be in the same micro niche, spending an hour or two doing research will probably give us enough material to write many articles.

Also some of your articles may be closely related. One page might target “tennis ball machine,” another “tennis ball machines,” and still another “ball machine for tennis,” since people are looking up these variations in the search engines. Someone won’t necessarily click all around your site (they may only read the one page and then click away on a Google ad or affiliate product link), so they won’t care if two articles are similar and just have a slightly different emphasis (I personally get bored just rewording the same article, so I tend to cover the keywords from different angles).

Examples of articles you could write using these three not-so-different keywords:

• “Can a Tennis Ball Machine Improve Your Game?”

• “Pitfalls of Training with Tennis Ball Machines When You’re a Beginner”
• “Ball Machines for Tennis–a Good Training Investment?”

The amount of research required is definitely something to consider when choosing your niche. With my home and garden sites, I can write several articles just from a book I pick up from the library (a book may be 100,000 or more words, whereas your articles may only be 400-500 words).

Don’t forget the “Personality Factor”

When I got started building sites for Adsense, it was still relatively easy to find a little niche to exploit (and as you can see from the tennis ball machine example, there are still small niches that aren’t that competitive yet). All you had to do was provide good information to stand above the crowd.

However, as more and more people come online and try to make money from their writing (and a lot of content creation is outsourced to other countries), information may not be enough.

What gets you noticed, and helps you create original quality content, is your personality. I may rely heavily on books as sources of information, but especially these days, I try to add my own quirky thoughts to my writing. And if it’s at all applicable for the niche, I’ll put little personal stories into the information.

Don’t be afraid to use your own voice, even in these informative articles that may be on dry subjects.

If you can write an article on sump pumps or septic tanks and make someone smile or nod in commiseration, chances are you’ll be creating a resource that people will link to naturally. Sure, you’ll still have to promote it, especially in the beginning, but in the end, you’ll have more than a “Made for Adsense” site that is obviously just there to make money.

Of course we want to make money, but we want to create assets others will find valuable. In the long run, it’s easier to monetize something like that anyway!