Creating Your Keyword List

After you’ve laid the foundation for organizing your social media activities by setting up your gmail account,  spend a few hours on creating the keyword list for your niche. Not knowing your keywords before attempting to do social networking is like navigating without a compass, driving without directions, or walking through a jungle at night with a blindfold on – you’re totally blind & helpless.  Fortunately for you, you’re reading this blog & subscribed to it’s RSS feed – so you always know what’s going on. Before doing your keyword research, you need to know what audience you are seeking. What products & services are you trying to promote?  What is your blog really about?  Don’t be too vague like "Helping people be successful" – that’s way too vague.  You want to precisely identify your audience (like "Raising Great Families" , "Xbox 360 owners" , "Fans of the movie The Godfather" , "Day Traders" etc…). The next thing you need to do is to create a list of 50 of the most important keywords for your niche.  These are the words that your intended audience are going to google and searching for.  This is the vocabulary you should be using. Without doing your keyword research, you will probably end up using 5-10 keywords repetitively & they may not even be the ones that people are searching for in your niche. Here are some tools for you to build your keyword list: KWMap.Net – Type in any niche keyword and this site will show you related keywords graphically as DNA-strand-looking pictures. It also produces a list of the related keyword phrases for you to copy.  Simply click on any of the suggested keywords and it will produce another related keyword search. This is a great tool to give you ideas of similar & related keywords.  Don’t build a huge list from this, use it to expand your thinking about your keywords. Only write down relevant keywords that your audience would search for. KeywordElite – This software lets you build massive reports of how much keywords cost, what people are bidding on them for pay per click, huge lists of related keywords. This software is not free.  If you’re serious about "owning a piece of the Internet" as my friend John Reese likes to say, it’s one of the most powerful tools you can use. WordTracker – This is the Rolls Royce of keyword research. This is for people who know what they’re doing.  If you have experience with SEO or you have just completed Traffic Secrets 2.0, you’ll know how to use this effectively. If not, this is too advanced for you. You should know about it, because you want to quickly get to the point where you can benefit from it’s awesome power! Amazon – Compiling a list of top authors & titles of the best selling books in your niche is a good idea. Although there aren’t many books dealing with social media yet, Joel Comm & his new book "Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time" are on my keyword list. You should have at least the top 10 authors & titles of their best selling books in your niche on your keyword list.  You should also look for any movies that people in your niche would watch. These are just a few tips for getting started with your keywords. You should also brainstorm your own list based on what you think would be the hottest keywords. Go to google and search for your keywords and see the other phrases people are using.  Take at least a few hours to build this initial list. Once you have your 50+ keyword list, you will want this to become your vocabulary. Look & think about this list often. Include these words in your titles, articles, tweets, profiles and every time you put words out there to the social networks.

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