Getting Traffic

We have entire categories on obtaining traffic. Essentially, email marketing can be combined with any traffic generating technique. As long as you are getting visitors to your website, you can start building a list. The 2 most common email marketing traffic techniques are PPC marketing and Article marketing. Please review these to decide which one you want to utilize to build your email marketing campaigns.

PPC Marketing Category

Article Marketing Category

However, the keyword approach to email marketing is very important. If you read the tutorial on the last page about Keyword Research, you should have a pretty good idea how you can easily take a simple keyword and dig down to find many smaller, less competitive niches.

Now, being more specific we are going to discuss the keyword approach you should take for email marketing (which is essentially the same thing, just in a different context).

The Keyword Approach for Email Marketing

Keyword relevance & quality has a big impact on opt-in conversions within PPC campaigns, so we are going to explain the best practices you should follow in order to select the highest converting keywords.

The most natural way to do keyword research, is to start with broad keywords. Since there are so many industries out there and so many niches within these industries, we want to explain this by using a specific example. In this example, we are assuming that we have chosen the "play guitar" niche.

The first thing you need to do is go to the Google Keyword Tool.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

In this example, we are going to start very broad. We typed "guitar" into Google. This will give us some ideas of the audience we are dealing with here (and some ideas for cross promotion as well) although it is not 100% targeted at this point.

This didn't yield anything relevant to play guitar at all, but it did do one thing for us however. It gave us an idea of what type of guitars people are playing. People looking to play a specific type of guitar may search a term like "play electric guitar".

There are also a few other keywords that could add significant value to a PPC-based email marketing campaign: "guitar lessons" and "beginner guitar". Both of these terms are something that a person would search if they were looking to play the guitar and that are also ideal customers.

So we got a few things out of this. We now understand the sheer size of the larger industry (a lot of people play the guitar) and we also know that people are looking for lessons out there. Two good starting points and this gives us solid grounds to base a high earning potential within this industry.

Now we will get a little more specific. We are going to search "play guitar". Here are the results:

A Little "Word" Trick

Here is a little trick that we use to easily boost our groups of relevant keywords. We use something that is completely free, the thesaurus.

http://thesaurus.reference.com/

Using the "guitar" example from above, you will take a keyword like "guitar lesson" and look for synonyms that you can replace terms within the phrase. For example, we will look for some other words out there that mean the same as "lesson".

keyword_ppc_thes_lesson.gif

Look at the variations we have from this alone.

guitar class
guitar coach
guitar education
guitar exercise
guitar practice
guitar school
guitar teacher
guitar tutor

You can then plug these search terms back into the keyword tool and get a list of relevant search terms to this. You need to remember that not all people perform research in the same way and type in the same search terms. By using the thesaurus you can address this and increase your campaign potential!

Elaborate and Group Keywords (PPC CAMPAIGNS ONLY)

Common Keyword Technique Tutorial

In the example above, you would want to elaborate your research once more on a particular keyword. In this case, we are going to put "play guitar ear" back into the keyword tool. Notice that we removed "by". We did this so we would yield the maximum results of keywords with the three common keywords "play", "guitar" and "ear" within them. Here are the results:

keyword_ppc_play_guitar_ear.gif

The above keywords could then be put into an ad group. Since these keywords are all highly relevant to one another, it would be very easy to create an ad that targeted ALL of the keywords and a landing page that targeted all of the keywords. Here is what your ad group would look like:

play bass guitar by ear
play guitar by ear
play guitar ear
play the guitar by ear
playing guitar by ear
to play guitar by ear

These keywords alone don't get a ton of traffic, but remember it is about quality, not quantity. If you combine the totals it does equal around 2,500 potential clicks per month. Say your ad gets just 5% of these...you will be getting 125 clicks to your page every month from these highly relevant keywords.

Then, you have a small opt-in page that is relevant to "play guitar by ear" and you get a 50% sign-up rate (which is definitely possible). Each month you will have 68 potential customers you can contact over and over again from this one little ad group.

**Landing pages are critical to the success of email marketing campaigns and will be elaborated on in the next lesson.

Scale this up a little to 10, 20 or even 100 ad groups and the size of this list of potential customers grows exponentially. This is the benefit of PPC traffic in combination with your email marketing campaigns. It is scalable, predictable and can be highly profitable!

Article Marketing Techniques

The only risk with article marketing is your time! Yes, time is valuable, but when starting out article marketing may be the best option. If you do have a budget however, we do want you to consider PPC...but only if you have a budget

Here is the flow of an Article Marketing campaign for email marketing.

Keyword -> Article -> Landing Page w/ Opt-in

This model is the most typical. The traffic will visit your article, regardless of the directory you submit it to, then it will go to a landing page that has your opt-in offer on it.

**Landing pages,also known as squeeze pages (in the email marketing context) are critical to the success of email marketing campaigns and will be elaborated on later in this guide.

As you will learn in the Article Marketing section, it is best to aim for keywords that have low competition with decent search volume. Again, to test competition, plug the keyword into Google with "" quotes around it. This searches for web pages that have that exact keyword phrase on the site, your REAL competition.

If the keyword has less than 5,000 quoted search results, it is a great keyword to focus on within an article. Let's look at an example:

"playing guitar by ear"

Here is a screen shot of the results:

As you can see, it has low competition (under 5,000) and from the above screen shot gets around 300 searches a month. This will be easy to get ranked under and a great starting point for a targeted campaign.