Long tail phrases, as you recall, are those multi-word keywords that typically have less traffic although are often very easy to rank for since they are overlooked by all the people chasing after the high volume keywords.

Long tail phrases, in aggregate, can account for 50% or more of your total traffic so they are not to be considered lightly. Check out your web logs and you’ll see what I mean.

If you only relying on the Google’s traffic estimator and sandbox tools for finding keywords then you are missing a ton of other long tail phrases since Google only displays a fixed number of keywords.

So where can you find long tail phrases?

Google itself provides 3 great sources:

1) Google Wonder Wheel

This is a fantastic tool that shows related keywords and themes in the form of a wheel surrounding your main keyword. What’s even more interesting is that you can click on any of the related keywords to drill down for even more related keywords. After 3 or 4 levels the keywords really start to drift away from your main keyword, though, so I would try to limited the levels to just 3 at the most.

2) Google Suggest

When you enter a keyword in Google search box, you’ll notice that it tries to provide you with suggested keywords. Often these are great long tail phrases that you can data mine for your keyword campaigns.

3) Google Related

This is another source of long tail phrases that seem to be different than those found in the Google Wonder Wheel.

So don’t limit your long tail research to just the standard Google tools that everyone else uses.

You can find a big list of both free and commercial mind mapping tools at Wikipedia’s site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mind_mapping_software

I see FreeMind mentioned in a lot of forums as a favorite free mind mapping tool.

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

However, my current favorite is one called http://www.bubbl.us/. This has a highly graphical and intuitive interface and while it may not have as many bells as whistles as FreeMind, I really preferred the user interface of Bubbl.us.

Check it out and tell me what you think.

In any case, I got some pictures of good-looking couples from iStockPhoto and made a decent header. I got some PLR articles and rewrote a few sentences — nothing special. I then put on a few Click Bank products on attracting women.

Sure enough, within a week or two I was ranking on the first page for my main keyphrase which was also my domain name. Hey, at least I did SOME SEO right!

Well, despite being on the first page of Google I noticed I wasn’t getting any clicks on the ClickBank products. So I decided to put on an actual product I found on Amazon, thinking that maybe people would be more likely to buy a physical product rather than a ClickBank eBook. The product was to *ahem* help men be more uh, attractive to women. You can probably guess what I’m talking about.

Within 2 days of posting the Amazon product…guess what?

It’s not what you think.

No, I didn’t make a sale. In fact, the opposite effect happened. My site lost it’s page 1 ranking. Completely. Not even in the top 100. The site was not deindexed, it just lost the page 1 ranking for my main keyword which as I mentioned before was also my domain name.

At first I thought it was just coincidence so I let the site “age” for a few more weeks, hoping that the ranking would return. I even did a little social bookmarking and submitted an Ezine article. Still no page 1 ranking.

So I decided to take off the Amazon product. Within 2 days I was back on page 1 again!

OK, was this just another fluke? I waited about a week and put the Amazon product back on. And sure enough, no more page 1 ranking.

This time I waited 2 weeks. Maybe if I waited a little longer I would get back to page 1. 2 weeks go by and no ranking.

Last chance. Take off the Amazon link. 2 days later, page 1 ranking again!

The lesson I learned? Be careful of not only what websites you link to — also be careful of what PRODUCTS you link to.

Some of them could be hazardous to your website’s health!

Frank and John ask Tony why people in IM fail so much. Tony describes a 4 part circular process of Potential -> Action -> Results -> Belief where people basically fail to believe in the end results so they spiral into failure. Basically, by changing your belief system you can reverse the spiral so that your spiral up to success.

http://tonyrobbinstraining.com/320/interview-with-frank-kern-and-john-reese/

I think this is an incredible eye-opener since many people feel that the reason for failure is due to lack of action. In reality, many people take lots of action. However, if they don’t believe in the results then they’re just spinning their wheels, taking random action after random action.

At some point all these random actions will be discouraging and the belief will wane, which eventually leads to a failure spiral.

If on the other hand you can visualize success to harden your belief system, then even when faced with set backs you’ll continue to take positive action and eventually spiral towards success!

Very clever, that Tony Robbins…

Tony Robbins also talks to John Reese one-on-one about making $1 million dollars in a single day and how that event allowed other people in IM to also break that psychological barrier.

http://tonyrobbinstraining.com/328/john-tony/

And one way successful people save time is by having internal business processes that have been streamline to be as organized and as efficient as possible.

So how can you and I learn to be a little more organized so that we can save some time?

I recently found out about two PC utilities that I think will help you to organize your computer.

The first program is called Fences and it helps to organize your PC desktop. If you are like me, you have a desktop that is full of icons. You try to organize them by grouping them together. However, after a while the icon groups start to merge into each other and you end up with one blobby mess. At one point I had literally every single spot on my desktop filled with an icon!

The second program is a nifty utility call JDiskReport that shows your PC disk usage. I download a lot of reports, programs, and utilities and in a short while I always find myself running out of hard disk space. Where does it all go? This disk reporting utility from JGoodies will tell you.

The best part about these two organizing utilities is that they’re free!

Download them today so you can get organized, save time, and make more money!

StarDock Fences

JGoodies JDiskReport

The offer normally follows this sequence: You offer something of perceived value to a customer. For example, a money-making report, a sample template, free PLR article. They give you their email first — this sequence is important — then you send them the freebie.

Having a huge list can literally be a money-making machine, if you do some simple math.

Let’s say you found a $47 affiliate offer on Clickbank where you can make $20 each time someone buys the product through you.

And imagine you have a list of 10,000 people with a low 2% response rate. That means each time you send out an offer to your list 2% of them will buy the product you are promoting. By the way, many marketers claim much higher response rates — often in the 10%+ range. For this exercise let’s be ultra-conservative and stick with our 2%.

You send out an email promoting this new Clickbank product and get 2% x 10000 = 200 purchases. And at $20 profit per purchase that’s an easy $4,000 — just for sending out an email.

No product development, no customer support. No wonder so many people want to build up a list! The bigger the list, the more money you make.

However, as with so many things internet we start to see the abuses.

I’ve seen many, many BIG NAME marketers become list-builders rather than customer-builders.

Some will offer cheap, borderline useless money-making “reports” as bait to lure unsuspecting newbies — and old-bies — into giving up their email address. To them, you are just a number to be added to their sales pool. The more in the pool, the more chance they’ll have to squeeze some money off of you.

Over time, my belief is that if more marketers continue to focus on list-building rather than on customer-building then we’ll start to see more people who are less willing to give up their email addresses for the ubiquitous free money-making report.

The offering won’t be “Give me your email address first, then I’ll give you my free report.”

Instead, we’ll need to switch the order to “I’ll give you my free report first. Then if you like it you can buy my product or sign up for more information.”

Now within your free report you can / should certainly have links to your other products. That’s fine. It’s the giving up the freebie to the customer to try before they give you their email address that I feel will be the more preferred order for customers.

There are mutual benefits to this change in order, though.

For the potential customer, he gets a true free sample before having to give up any information. There is growing concerns about giving up any personal information, even if it turns out to be an email address that you intend to throw away later.

From the marketer’s perspective, this puts more emphasis on providing a truly good sample to impress customers right from the start. No more low quality bait reports.

Overall, I feel this change in the opt in order can build a better level of trust between the marketer and the customer which leads to a better and more profitable long term relationship.

Lately, there has been some controversy in the IM community over the efficacy of article marketing. Some people believe that the article marketing strategy has been oversaturated and does not bring as much traffic or link building power as it used to.

In addition, EzineArticles.com has made some recent changes to their layout to increase their own Adsense ads which has frustrated many marketers.

Tim Gorman, who is extremely well-known for his vast article marketing expertise, has recently started a post over at the Warrior Forum where he discusses at length all the techniques he uses to optimize his own articles.

He calls his 5 component system “Article Marketing Visitor Superiority (VS) and describes in full detail how to research and construct the article title, summary, keywords, body, and resource box.

I have purchased many of Tim’s ebooks and the information he provides — for free — at the forum is just as high quality.

So if you want to maximize your own article marketing efforts like the pros, I highly recommend you print out, read, and implement the techniques Tim describes in the thread.

Tim Gorman’s Article Marketing Visitor Superiority.

And tell me what you think about Tim’s article marketing strategy.

Site A which I talked about in my first Profit Pattern Example did very well for Adsense at $11.48 / day, Site B didn’t do quite as well with only $1.04 per day, and Site C was somewhat average with $3.06 / day from both Adsense and eBay listings.

Here are some patterns I think are worth noting.

1) First of all, none of my sites have a ton of content.

While having more content can certainly mean more keywords indexed and hence more clicks, it’s very possible to do well with a smaller number of high-quality, keyword rich pages.

2) Look for keywords with a low average number of backlinks, low average PR, and low allintitle number.

So what are the magic numbers to look for? I’m still going to stick with my original numbers from previous posts:

average backlinks of top 10 sites – less than 30
average PR of top 10 sites – less than 2
allintitle for keyword phrase – less than 500

3) Quoted search seems to be less indicative of easy ranking than backlinks, PR, and allintitle.

Although a low quoted search number would imply fewer sites with that phrase and possibly less competition, I think the backlinks and PR are much stronger indicators because they are more tightly associated with the competing sites who you are trying to outrank.

The two other components that I haven’t discussed are the traffic and Adsense.

You can get a general feel for these numbers from the Google Traffic Estimator https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox although you need to take their numbers with a grain of salt because they are often inaccurate, especially with highly niche keywords.

If you have any similar statistics and would like to share please leave a comment.

This second site did only $376 in Adsense for all of 2008, making that a meager daily average of just $1.03.

Despite the low revenue I think we can still glean a lot of patterns that will help us in our search for similar performing keywords, at least in terms on getting onto page one of Google.

Keyword
Quoted Keyword Search
For this site I actually had several keyword phrases that ranked well on the first page of Google. I’ll refer to them as KW1, KW2, and KW3.

KW1 – less than 275,000 for a quoted search
KW2 – less than 200 for a quoted search
KW3 – less than 600 for a quoted search

Unquoted Keyword Search

KW1 – about 400,000 unquoted search
KW2 – about 100,000 unquoted search
KW3 – about 200,000 unquoted search

Backlinks of Competition

KW1 – average number of backlinks for each of the top 10 sites = 81
KW2 – average number of backlinks for each of the top 10 sites = 18
KW3 – average number of backlinks for each of the top 10 sites = 5

PageRank of Competition

KW1 – average page rank for the top 10 sites = 1.4
KW2 – average page rank for the top 10 sites = 1.1
KW3 – average page rank for the top 10 sites = 1.4

allintitle:

KW1 – 6510
KW2 – 8
KW3 – 7

Amount of Content
This site is another WordPress blog with 9 posts and 4 pages.

Each page and post has either my main keyword or an LSI term in the title.

Revenue
As mentioned above this site only did about $1 / day in Adsense for all of 2008. Although it got a reasonable amount of clicks per day, the per click payout from Adsense was quite low.

Adsense Layout
I have just one Adsense block on the site that appears on each page and post — a 336 x 280 block in the upper left hand corner.

I also had a ClickBank book affiliate link which made nil and eBaypartner listings since April 2008 which made only about $4.00 in total.

Summary and Comparison

Keyword 1 statistics seemed to be a bit of an outlier as far as the quoted and unquoted search strings. If we consider the average page rank, backlinks, and allintitle figures then we can see those numbers tend to fit within the statistics so far of the site in the first example.

top 10 competitive back links – less than 30
top 10 page rank average – less than 2
allintitle: – less than 500

So if you can find a keyword phrase with similar statistics there may be a decent chance that you can rank on page one of Google without too much work.

If you have any patterns of your own you would like to share, then please leave a comment.

While for obvious reasons I can’t give out the exact domain name, I can give you some of the other characteristics that may help you when doing keyword research and creating your own sites.

Keyword
Quoted Keyword Search
The main keyword I am targeting is a three word phrase and the quoted results is less than 10,000 in Google. For example, let’s say my main keyword is “green widget hammers.” If you do a search literally for “green widget hammers” with the quotes then Google will return less than 10,000 as the number of results.

Unquoted Keyword Search
A Google search for green widget hammers without the quotes returns less than 50,000.

Backlinks of Competition
Using the link: command in Yahoo shows that the average number of backlinks for each of the top 10 sites is less than 30.

PageRank of Competition
The average PageRank for each of the top 10 sites for my keyword phrase is less than 2.

allintitle:
Another competitive indicator that some people like to use is the Google allintitle: search operator. This operator will restrict the results to only sites that have the specified keywords in the title.

For example: allintitle:”green widget hammers” to find the number of sites with “green widget hammers” in their title tag.

For my example site the allintitle operator returns less than 500.

Amount of Content
The site has 17 pages of content. It’s a WordPress blog with 12 posts and 5 pages.

Each page and post has either my main keyword or an LSI term in the title.

Revenue
Per the Google terms of service found at https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms, “You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program” so I am able to tell you that from January 1, 2008 to December 31 2008 the site made a total of $4189.86 in Adsense, which averages to about $11.48 per day.

Adsense Layout
I have just one Adsense block on the site that appears on each page and post — a 336 x 280 block in the upper left hand corner where everyone tells you to put one.

I also have a 468 x 15 text line beneath the top navigation and another one in the footer area. Nothing really fancy.

As you can see it’s possible to make some decent money even without tons of content.

What made my life a lot easier was first picking a long tail keyword with low competition and with the patterns I described above:

quoted search – less than 10,000
unquoted search – less than 50,000
top 10 competitive back links – less than 30
top 10 page rank average – less than 2
allintitle: – less than 500

The keyword I used had some decent Adsense click revenue. This is something you can check on using the Google Traffic Estimator tool.

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

I hope this gives you some idea on what patterns to look for when doing keyword research and building your sites.

I will uncover more profit patterns for other keywords and sites in future posts.

If you have your own particular set of successful pattern indicators that you would like to share, please be sure to leave a comment.