I’m going to title this Case Study “Article Money”, simply because we’re going to earn money by writing articles.  There’s nothing fancy involved, and even the most basic beginner will be able to do this.  The articles don’t have to be exceptional, but they do have to be fairly well written, especially since we hope to earn a little money up-front from them.  Our biggest concern is establishing a small residual income, though, and that’s why we have to do this first step.

Keyword research will tell us what terms and words people are entering when they perform their searches in Google.  Determining your main subject will be up to you, but I’ll show you what I did in order to figure out what articles I want to write.  If you have any passions, or interests, then I suggest you try writing about them first.  This will make it easier, and will also allow you to write even faster.  If you’re allowing yourself an hour each day, then being able to write 3 instead of 2 articles per hour will mean a difference of about $40 at the end of our study.

The first thing I did was go to the Google Keyword Tool.  You’ll see a box that says “Enter one keyword or phrase per line:”.  In that box I entered “How To” and clicked  the button underneath that says “Get Keyword Ideas”.  This brought up several different subjects that I could choose to write about.  Among them were “How To Smoke Weed”, “How To Grind”, “How To Make French Toast”, and many more.  While deciding on a niche to write about, I also paid attention to the numbers in the Approximate Average Search Volume column.  The higher the number, then the more that keyword is searched, which means that we could possibly get more page views to our article.

I’m going to state the goal of this case study, and make sure to repeat it in every post that I make about it.  This case study will be to write articles that generate residual income by targeting keywords that are more commonly searched in Google.  Does that make sense?  That’s why we’re interested in that Search Volume column of the results.

Anyway, I looked through that list and found about 5 subjects that interested me, and also had searches of around 20,000 per month.  Since I’m planning on writing about 26 - 30 articles during this study, I figured that I should easily be able to write an average of 6 articles per subject.  The first subject that I chose is one that I’m actually pretty interested in learning, and have no experience in.

Step 2 in our keyword research is to expand from our main keyword and find several other keywords to use in our articles.  Take your main keyword and put it in the textbox, along with any other variations that you can think of.  Let’s say you want to use “How To Train Your Dog”, for example.  Put that in the text box, hit enter, and type in anything else you can think of.  Other phrases would be “dog training”, “train dogs”, “train a dog”, “dog training tips”, “train dog tips”, you get the idea.  Don’t spend a lot of time on this, maybe just a minute or two trying to come up with more stuff to enter.  Once you’re ready, click the button and do your search.  You may find other fairly generic terms in the results that you think would be good to enter into your search.  If you do, just enter them in the textbox under all the others and search again.

With your results on the screen, click on the “Average Search Results” column to sort the results.  We want the higher numbers at the top.  When they are in order, read through them and click on the “Add” link at the right of the keywords if you feel you can write a 300 - 400 word article about that topic.  You’ll notice that many of them seem the same, but we’re going to target those keywords specifically, so we will write an article for each one.  We’re also going to use them within the various articles we write too, which will be powerful for optimizing for the search engines.  You’ll want to stop when you hit the keywords that are only searched about 1,000 per monnth or less.  Go through the first list of words, and then scroll down and go through the second list of words.  When you’re done, you should have anywhere from 10 - 40 keywords, or even more.

Click the link under the keywords to Download them as a text file.  Open the text file and look at your keywords.  It may be a fairly large list, but we’re going to make it a little smaller in this next step.  Go through the keywords and if there’s a smaller keyword that exists in a larger keyword, get rid of it.  For example, if you have the keywords “Train Your Dog” and “How To Train Your Dog”, then you can eliminate the first one because it is going to be targeted in the second keyword anyway.

After you’ve done that, you should hopefully be left with several keywords to use for your articles over the next couple weeks.  If you don’t have at least 25 keywords in your list, then you will have use some keywords over, or find more on a different subject.  You can even go back and find more keywords for your current subject if you want, too.  Just make sure you have enough to do all the articles that we’re going to do.  I anticipate being able to do around 2 articles per hour.  Since our first hour is used with keyword research, then that leaves us with 13 days out of a 14 day case study.  As I said before, assuming we average $3.50 for each of the 26 articles, that will be a nice total of $91 that we can use to fund other ideas and ventures.  In fact, I have a whole list of ideas lined up, so we should be able to jump from this right into something else that should help us earn a little more income.  The reason we’re doing the keyword research is to find keywords that are more heavily searched, so we can earn even more money through the pageview bonus.  With 16 articles online I earn $2 - $3 per month and I don’t have to lift a finger.  I figure that with the right keyword research, which I didn’t do any of on those articles, we should easily bring in $5 - $10 per month in residual income.  This is money that we don’t have to do anything for, it just keeps coming for as long as the articles are out there.  Later we’re going to go over some methods to push your articles and try to get them more exposure, but for now we’re just going to submit them and let them season out there.  It took a while to start earning the steady monthly income, but now I’m still earning from articles that I submitted 2 years ago.

Ok, this is the first hour of the case study.  Once you’re done, you will have a keyword list and we’ll be able to start writing articles.  It doesn’t matter if you know the subject at all or not.  Part of the time will be spent learning about it, and the rest will be spent writing about it.  Google will be our friend here, so make sure you know how to use it.  Stay tuned for Hour 2.

Chris