What are the best keywords for affiliate marketing? The answer to this question will depend on a number of factors:
- What affiliate product/s you are promoting?
- The marketing strategy you are using – SEO (search engine optimisation), social media or Paid Ads.
- Your target audience – who are the people you want to reach with your marketing message?
- What platform are you using/where are your audience hanging out? Social media, Google search, YouTube etc?
When you know the answer to the above questions, finding the keywords relevant for your audience, platform and products becomes more clear. The best keywords for affiliate marketing are those which result in sales; not just traffic and not just subscribers. To get sales in affiliate marketing you need to find traffic and send them to your offers. When you make a sale, you should be able to track the sale back to the keywords you have used to generate it.
When you can do this successfully, you’ll know for certain which keywords are the best for your particular campaign. Different campaigns, adverts products and audiences will require different keywords to make them successful.
Best Keywords For Affiliate Marketing: Paid Ads
If you’re using paid adverts and keywords, you will need to determine which keywords are going to work the best by running several ads and looking at your results. Using Google’s Adwords program will allow you to set certain keywords to target your audience with and run ads for those particular keywords. If you’re too specific in your keyword usage too early, you can limit your ability to drive a large number of visitors.
For example, lets say you’re going to send traffic to an offer which is to do with “weight loss”. Head over Google’s free keyword planner and type in “weight loss” into the planner. You’ll see a number of variations of this keyword which you can use in your advertising campaign.
Searching For Keywords
Shorter term keywords with only two or three words in them tend to be fairly vague. If you click on the Avg. monthly searches tab at the top, you’ll see longer term keywords (which get fewer searches). Although you’ll typically get fewer monthly searches for long tail keyword phrases, they are also often more focused. These are good for affiliates because the visitor has a more specific intention behind their search. So if you’re selling a specific product, you are more likely to make sales by targeting those keywords which are more relevant to your item.
If you have a specific affiliate product you are promoting, you can use Google’s keyword planner to find keywords which relate to your product very specifically. These are some of the best ones to target because it means your visitors will have a strong intention to buy. Vague keywords like “weight loss” are much less specific. You can end up spending a lot of money running ads without making any sales if you use them; even if they relate to your product.
Best Keywords For Affiliate Marketing: SEO
SEO (or search engine optimisation) is another affiliate marketing strategy which uses content to find traffic from the search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc). This article is an example of how to create keyword focused traffic from the search engines. I have specifically targeted this article for its keywords in order to give me a chance of a free listing on the SERPS – search engine results pages.
To use this strategy you need to create content which is targeting specific keywords in your blog posts or videos (if using YouTube). To find those keywords you need to use Google’s keyword tool. Type in your main “seed” keyword which relates most to the affiliate product that you are promoting. Using the weight loss/fitness example again, lets say you’re promoting a “six pack abs” product to help shed belly fat!
Type your keyword into the keyword planner and click on the Avg. Monthly searches tab until you find the longer tail keywords which have less competition. Although this is a competitive topic, to have more chance of ranking your content on the searches for free you’ll need to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. These have less traffic, but typically are easier to rank for than the main keywords in this topic. If you’re building a blog around this topic, finding the long tail keywords for your niche and writing content for them is a good strategy for free traffic.
A similar strategy can be used for YouTube videos and other social media platforms if you want to use social media.
Your Target Audience + Product/s
Your target audience is something you want to get to know very well if you want to become successful as an affiliate marketer. This is the audience where you’ll find the people who want what you have to sell. The best keywords for affiliate marketing are the ones which define your target audience and allow you to lead them to your products.
Whether you’re using paid marketing or organic marketing, you’ll need to find your target audience by understanding the intent behind their keyword search. Some keyword searches are vague and others are more specific.
As an example, the search for “car tyres” is very vague and leaves a lot of questions open. If you target the keyword car tyres and are only selling a specific tyre, you’ll be wasting a lot of money. On the other hand, if you sell tyres which fit the description of “recommended tires for bmw 328i” and target that particular keyword in your marketing, you’ll be making a lot of sales.
See also target audience for affiliate marketing.
Testing And Measuring
Ultimately you’ll need to determine the best keywords for affiliate marketing through a process of testing and measuring. By running ads using many keywords in your niche, you’ll be able to use the data to determine which keywords give you the best click through rate, cost per click and of course which keywords lead to sales the most.
Some keywords will be more expensive to pay for and/or harder to rank on the search engines. Some keywords will tend to bring in more sales than others, but might cost more. Others will bring in cheaper traffic but might lead to less sales. Only by testing and measuring different advertising campaigns will you ultimately know which keywords work best for you given the product you’re choosing to sell and the marketing strategies you’re going to use.
