“How to do keyword research for Amazon affiliate marketing”

This is a transcription of Fabian’s Webinar on 2009 February 11th 7:00 (+8:00 GMT). This has been my favorite topic from Fabian and hearing it repeated is always welcome as it allows me to pick up a lot of more tips that I miss.

Start with going to Amazon and select a product category that appeals to you. Say for example we go into “baby” areas … And we have humidifier that seem to sell very well.

So let’s now plug “humidifier” into the Google Adwords Tool and humidifier volume is at 1,500,000 for January 2009 and it is way too high with too many competitors for beginners. Look down to an area of between 5000 and 6000 searches. For example “portable humidifier”, although the trend bar is not ideal but it is good enough.

Take “portable humidifier” and enter Google Search, you will see a 106,000 and there are no serious competition. Use “allintitle:portable humidifier” and it shows 2,780. This is the kind of product that would be perfect for beginners.

Now go to Amazon and search for “portable humidifiers”. Locate and pick one that shows sales, popularity and reasonable cost.

Get a domain name, from godaddy.com. You need a domain with the keyword phrase and http://www.portablehumidifier.com is already taken, but when you search the domain, no one had built a site; someone is cyber-squatting the domain. Now try portable-humidifier.com and it is available. The domain goes towards building page rank. You can also write articles that would point it back to your own domain. That is why a website is preferred over using a blog.

Having a keyword in the Domain is the best for niche area products, but it does not bode well for huge volume products and in most cases, it would have already been taken. Always use http://www.portable-humidifier.com in link backs, ie, with the “www” and not just http://portable-humidifier.com. This http://www.portable-humidifier.com is known as an absolute URL which works best for SEO while http://portable-humidifier.com is a relative link and it is not as well ranked in SEO.

Go back to adwords tool and search “portable humidifier” and built a site for each keyword phrase, it would all eventually add up to driving traffic to your main site.

A recommended website creation tool would be XSitePro – easy to create and it’s template is already SEO optimized.  I remember this one, Andrew Boey, my good friend told me about it too.

Spend more time on Market Research and Traffic Generation.

A word on Key Phrase Differences; between “ballroom dancing video” and “ballroom dancing dvd”, what would be the difference, if any? The first one has a lot more traffic but may not convert well, because a large percentage is possibly trying to locate a YouTube video to learn it for free. While the later will convert well because users searching for this later phrase will be looking for a product and would probably enter the third phase of Fabian’s “keyword lifecycle” – Research >>> Comparison >>> Buy

Buy phase key phrases may include product brand and model, e.g. “digital camera” would be a Research phase key phrase, but a buy key phrase would be like “Nikon D90″.

A word on SEO Rank; between http://keyword.domain.com verses http://www.domain.com/keyword verses http://www.domain.com/keyword.html – that is subdomain versus directory versus filename – There is no difference in SEO Ranking.

However subdomains can be great for offline advertising. E.g. we advertise on The Straits Times on a product and you drive it to http://st.domain.com; it will return information on conversion of your offline advertisement. If we use a directory then readers of your advertisement may type your domain but miss the directory and they end up in your domain home and you could loose your conversion tracking.

So, in my own personal conclusion, if I do up an Amazon affiliate marketing campaign for http://www.portable-humidifier.com then I should use http://limpengheng.com/portable-humidifier to blog and drive traffic to my main site at http://www.portable-humifier.com

Okay, so I hope you enjoy my post here as much as I had enjoyed transcribing it during Fabian’s Webinar.