tdog.blog

By now most of you know that you can go to https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox and figure out how much certain keywords will cost you if you’re going to put together an SEM or PPC campaign. (And if you didn’t, then the link above will surely point the way!)

What I really like about this tool, though, is that it comes in rather handy when it comes time to complete my research. You see, my process for brainstorming niche ideas usually starts out pretty right-brained. I might do a free-association exercise (check out wordassociation.org if you need help here), listing out 100 or 200 subtopics or words that I think relate to a certain niche.

Once that’s done, I take a little breather and then come back to it with categorization in mind. I usually follow the bucket sort algorithm (kinda) by just shoving even generally associated terms into fairly large groups or buckets. For example, if 10-12 terms are all about fashion, they all go into the fashion bucket. Same goes for water sports, pet care, etc.

The next step is to dig in to each bucket to figure out where all the sub-buckets are, and then to see how they relate to each other inside a bucket and then across buckets. It’s this last step where you make some pretty ingenious connections. For example, you might have some travel-related scuba stuff connecting with some other water sports or women’s fitness vacations or what not.

The last big heuristic is to look at this magical mind map and wipe out anything that you just don’t have a heart to support. You might think that topics arrayed around the idea of all-women’s fitness vacations to Mexico and Central America might be fun, but you have no desire to actually crawl up inside that niche and get to know it with further research. Or you might look at that and your entire world might spin around because that’s exactly the key to the success of your niche marketing efforts!

At some point, you’re left with a much tighter mind map of associated topics, all of them in their little buckets. Some of you are smiling, because you know about the campaign -> ad group -> ad hierarchy in Google AdWords. That’s right, your main topic, whatever that is, but let’s call it women’s vacations, that becomes the campaign. All the buckets (women’s fitness vacations, women’s vacations in the mediterranean, women’s vacations in australia, and so on) become ad groups, and each of your topics become different ads.

Now it’s time to figure out the left-brain side of the equation. You have a mind-map of sorts, and you’ve got lots of juicy stuff, so now its time to figure out what it’s gonna cost you. So you enter your keywords into the traffic estimator to see how much this will cost you.

As you can see from the screen shot above, you’ll be paying about a dollar a click for the more general term “women’s vacation” but there isn’t enough data out there to estimate your costs on some of the more long tail terms. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and in a later post I’ll talk about getting more data.

For now though, you know one thing for sure: it’s relatively cheap to get into this PPC market, which again, may not be a good thing. I like to see a bit of competition. There may be other data to consider, of course–you may have been closely watching travel magazines and travel shows and seen an uptick in the advertising devoted to women’s vacation. There may be an upward trend in pop culture offerings on the subject, or articles in the press.

Bottom line: don’t let keyword estimation tools be the end-all, be-all of your decision making process. They exist only to help you with the “spreadsheet logic” and shouldn’t totally overwhelm all of your thinking.