1 – THE most important thing you can do – Keyword Research

Keyword Research

[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:23] Hi everyone. Tom here.

[00:00:25] Welcome to the maiden voyage of the Screw the Commute podcast. I'm thrilled you're here. In this first episode, I'll give you a little background about myself and what you can expect if you subscribe to the podcast. Plus, today's lesson will be the number one biggest mistake I've seen in over 21 years of teaching internet marketing to small business people. If you're making that mistake I'm also going to tell you what to do about it.

[00:00:56] If you like what you hear, please subscribe for you podcast newbies out there we have instructions on how to do that at the website Screwthecommute.com. Also leave us a review and we'll have instructions on how to do that too. Now if you're leaving a good review you'll click on the good link. Now leaving a bad review, click on a bad link that will either not work at all or take you to somebody else's podcast.

OK so why should you listen to me? Well I've never had a job outside of high school and the beginning of college. I started my own business formally in 1977 while I was still in college but I've really been entrepreneurial and selling things since I was about 10 years old. Now by the time I graduated college starting with nothing I owned five apartment buildings and a hotel. My daily life was going to the post office and picking up rent checks. I dropped them off at the bank and that was it. The rest of the day was my own to work out, play sports, go to the movies, travel or pretty much anything I wanted to do.

I really loved the idea of flying so I hung around the airport and got my commercial pilot's license and I freelanced as a charter pilot for several years. Now that was cool but I was really kind of just a high class chauffeur. Then I got the bright idea to start a bar nightclub. Oh boy. Gunfights, knife fights. I broke numerous noses and arms throwing people out of the place. Bikers were trying to kill me. They blew up my car with shotgun blasts. I was lucky to get out of there alive.

Then I moved to Washington DC and started a crazy entertainment company. I decided when I got that bar business whatever I did was going to be fun for me and nobody was going to want to hit me with beer bottles.

[00:03:03] So I started a crazy entertainment company called Prankmasters. We custom design practical jokes. This was long before Punked and all those kinds of places were on TV and that kind of got me into the speaking business around the early 90s. Around 1994 the commercial Internet came along and I'm thinking to myself you mean I can sell stuff around the world, sitting on my butt in my basement from my computer? I'm going to figure this out.

I mean I didn't make a nickel for two years trying to figure it out. And then I got good training from what I call the 31 year old grandfather of Internet marketing a guy named Corey Rudl. Now he's unfortunately passed away in a tragic car accident. In those days,

[00:03:53] I paid him twelve hundred thirty dollars for a half an hour. I took his training and then I immediately started making money. Four years later I was an Internet multimillionaire which I enjoy and build on to this day. I saw all kinds of stuff. I mean family and business protection dogs, tennis stuff, I have a crazy site called Fatsotennis.com. Public speaking stuff. I made loads of money selling public speaking stuff and that's not an easy sell because most people hate public speaking. Made lots of money doing that. Raised money for charity. What I like best about it is that I only deal with people I like. I mean if I don't like you you can just take a hike. I mean if I really don't like you I may come after you and my consumer advocate role I'll talk to you about that in a minute, called Scam Brigade.

Another really great thing that you'll want to tune into this podcast for is because I teach and I have been doing this for over 20 years teaching people how to make their hobbies tax deductible legitimately like the tennis stuff and the dog stuff you know. Anything you can think of most people are just paying through the nose to do their hobby and don't get any credit for it. So I'll teach you how to do that.

[00:05:15] Now I'm very much against all the Internet scams and I have a TV show in development with a big Hollywood production company that's called scam brigade. You can check out the trailer at the website scambrigade.com. We'll have it in the show notes below.

[00:05:32] Now I don't have any delusions of grandeur. They told me point blank don't quit your day job.

[00:05:39] But I'm hoping that that comes to fruition because there's so many people getting ripped off on these Internet things and older people are losing their homes and younger people are losing their inheritance from the older people that are losing their homes. So it's a multibillion dollar problem and I'm hoping to help address it. So anyway that's my consumer advocate stuff.

[00:06:02] Let's see. Now I also have the honor of an entirely separate Hollywood production company approached me about doing a documentary about my life and I'm thinking hey I thought you're supposed to be dead before that happens, but it's called the American Entrepreneur. And it's how my dad came to this country on a cattle boat in the early 1900s.

[00:06:25] He became an entrepreneur and made me into one and I've helped thousands of people that tell their boss that take this job and shove it. All right enough about me let's talk about me some more. You'll find out I'm a little goofy and you can make a lot of money and have a lot of fun.

[00:06:46] That's part of the name of this thing, Screw the Commute. I don't want to sit in a car making other people rich I want to help you get rich and enjoy all the things that go along with it.

[00:06:58] All right. So before we get into today's topic which is a great one and it's something no small business owner should ignore. Just a little bit about the schedule right now since this is the first maiden voyage I'm planning on doing a Monday training session like this.

[00:07:17] Although you won't have to listen to all my bio on all of them on Mondays and then on Wednesdays and Fridays I'll be interviewing other successful entrepreneurs. So that's the schedule now. You can always check if there's any updates on that at Screwthecommute.com, the home site of this podcast.

[00:07:40] All right. Let's take a short message from our sponsor and then we'll get into today's topic keyword research and how important it is to your business.

[00:07:50] Today almost two billion of you will go online retrieving over 100 billion searches for information goods and services and 6 million of you will view a page on the Internet. Before this commercial is over the world has changed and so is the way we do business at the Internet Marketing Training Center. You can study online at your pace to fit your schedule and you can graduate with the skills and knowledge to compete in the global marketplace or start your own home based business. Call us today or go online at IMTCVA.org because it's about time. Yours.

[00:08:22] Ok, let's get into today's topic. Remember this is the biggest mistake I've identified in over seventeen hundred students over 20 some years. Number one is they don't do keyword research. They get what they believe is a great idea. I call them CSIs. That's the TV show and crime scene investigation. No I say that's crappy stupid idea. Right. And guess what. All ideas are crappy and stupid including my own. Until you can prove they aren't with real numbers that somebody actually wants what you've got.

Now when I say the word keyword I really mean keyword and keyword phrases. See this is the way you're found on the Internet that bring in new customers an e-mail list subscribers and all the people that are going to hear about you and publicity all that stuff. Now my name is not a keyword. I mean if I was Tony Robbins maybe it would be a key word but I'm not what you have to keep in mind is there's always more people that never heard of you then have heard of you. If they've heard of you, they can easily find you. We want the people who never heard of us to find us based on what we can do for them. That's the key here.

Now there's a big return on investment to this tedious boring work because you use the key words in so many ways. Once you do this keyword research unless something crazy changes in your industry you do it once and you've got this enormous list the keywords and you use them on your Web site and blog postings and articles and videos.

[00:10:18] Podcasts, transcripts, webinars, teleclasses and whatever they haven't invented yet. All right go use them because the Internet still works on words until they start embedding chips in your head which may not be long. But for now keywords are how it works. Now when I ask most businesspeople how many keywords apply to them I get answers from I don't know maybe 10 to at the most 30. That's what most small business owners believe that people are typing in to find them.

Well let me give you an example we did a wedding reception book because I did have a eulogy book and wedding speech book and wedding toast book and things like that. These are the books. So we did what I called Deep keyword research on this wedding reception book. What do you think we found for how many keywords and key word phrases had to do with wedding reception? yeah go ahead guess hold your hands up up there. All right. Yeah. Sixty three hundred keywords and key word phrases.

So guess what. If you had a wedding reception book and you had ten keywords that people were finding you on. And I had 6300. Who do you think is going to win selling their wedding reception? This applies across the board to whatever field you're in. Doesn't matter if it's business to business or what. There's way more keywords and key word phrases that people are typing than you can imagine. So how do you find them? There's lots of ways to do it.

[00:12:00] Well I'll give you several of them here. One is there's tools on the Internet one that we use is called the Google keyword planner. Some tools you can get to in about 10 seconds. I'm going to give you I tell you that right now as you're typing into Google to search for something while you're typing before you even get done typing results are starting to come up and a little box drops down with other related phrases and they're trying to anticipate what you are typing. Stop right there. Take a piece of paper on the side or another window somewhere because if you move the window disappears on you and write down those keywords and key word phrases at the same time go down to the bottom of the page or you can actually finish the search and then go to the bottom of the page and there's a whole bunch of related searches. They're doing your research for you. Let me tell you something. Those words wouldn't be there if they weren't used heavily in Google. Right? Think about it. Why would Google Suggest other ones that nobody ever uses. So write them down.

The other way is you can look at your competitors Web sites and promo materials. That's a good way to see what they are using they might have tripped on some that you didn't know about. Now you can get a geek now I lovingly call the tech people geeks and propeller heads and techno geeks. Techno nerds but I highly suggest you keep these young people around.

[00:13:42] I mean they help make me rich. I started in 1997 recruited a 10th grader who is now a millionaire in Los Angeles.

[00:13:52] You'll hear about him and in other episodes we'll probably have him on here. Get them to show you how to look at keywords associated with your competitors videos and Web sites you can see it behind the scenes if you know how to do it right. I can't really show you here on this audio podcast but you really need these young people because they cut through and stuff that would take you hours minimum or days or weeks to learn a lot of times they do it in like 10 seconds. All right so it's really worthwhile to do that. We'll probably do a whole episode on recruiting geeks but get them to show you that the words that are associated with your competitors Web sites and videos.

Another thing you can do is ask your customers what they would type when looking for your service. I mean you can also survey your e-mail list even if they're not customers. Now one tip I learned from a guy that wrote the book "Ask", his name is Ryan Levesque, is don't give incentives like we always have done to get people to fill out surveys because we want the people that are most gung ho about the topic that don't need an incentive. A lot of people that you give them an incentive they're just doing it to get the freebie and they could they just zoom through the answers.

[00:15:15] I've done it myself lots of times. So don't give an incentive and you might check out that book called "Ask" by Ryan Levesque. Now the first half of the whole book he's kind of bragging about his credentials. But the second half is gold telling you how to do this. You don't have to buy his fancy software or anything but the ideas on surveying people that know you are just excellent.

[00:15:39] Let's see. Now let's go to this keyword planner by Google. It's FREE. Free tool but they make it quite a pain in the neck to get to use it. But it's really worth it once you get get signed up. What they do is you have to pretend like you're going to advertise to get access to the tool. So you have to sign up for a Google ad words account ad words as the the advertising arm of Google.

So you sign up for an account and they're going to lead you through like an ad they're going to help you create your first ad you just put anything in there you want because you can pause the ad and it's never going to run but it's going to get you access to the tool. Now you may want to run ads that I'm sure will do episodes on that in the future. But just to get access to the tool you have to pretend like you're going to advertise, you're going to put your credit card in and all this stuff. And if you have a Google account already it's just another one of the features. But you have to sign up separately for it.

All right. So you finally get to the tool and if you put a seed word of your keywords at the top it kicks out I think up to 800 other ways people are typing that in and how many times per month they're typing that and then you can hit a button and download the whole list to your computer.

[00:17:07] Now I suggest you do this for a week. OK. And really get an idea like oh my. And this always happens to my students there. Their jaw drops like oh my god I never thought of that. And if they never thought of that that means all of the other people in the world that did think of it that are looking for X, Y and Z with a certain keyword phrase are not finding you. They're finding your competitor who was smart enough to do this work. So this is really serious stuff that will help your business like crazy.

Here's the deal when you're not actually advertising they just give you ranges on how many times per month like it might say zero to 1000. Well that might still be valuable to you even just for the fact that you're seeing different ways people are typing in and that in itself is valuable but we really would like to know more accurately which keyword phrases are better than the others because you only have so much time in the day. When I told you I had 63 hundred keywords on that wedding reception book. Do you think I use them all. No I didn't. But I was able to sort them so that I could use the most popular ones.

[00:18:28] You know something was getting two searches a month. I can't spend the time to use that keyword all over the place because it's the payback is not big enough. Anyway, if you advertise even a small ad where you're maybe paying five cents or 3 cents a click on some YouTube ad. Which again later episode we'll talk about YouTube ads and things like that. Then you get the accurate numbers. So instead of zero to 1000 it's going to say 212 times last month per month. And then the other one might say 840. So you would want to spend your time on the one that's got 840 rather than 212. If you're limited on time.

I will give you an opposite thing. See the more popular a keyword is the more competitive it will be normally because other people are doing this research also and putting their time into the most valuable keywords. So one method you can use is go opposite and go to the bottom of the list and work backwards. Now you say well I thought you just told me that there you know there's only two searches a month is not worth it. Well you know I probably wouldn't go to two searches a month but I would go down the list where it's less competitive and work backwards towards the top of the list. And what does this get you?

[00:19:59] Well it's less competitive. So even though there's less searches you may get a higher ranking faster that way than waiting and fighting it out on the really popular keywords where you may never get a really great ranking. So that's just an alternate way to use these. You're still going to use these keywords like crazy so don't get discouraged about competition out there. In fact there's a column in there about competition. Ignore it if you stick with me long enough you're going to blow by your competition in lots of ways so don't worry about that.

All right so once you get this enormous list the keywords and sort the ones you're going to actually work on. What do you do with it? Well the most important part of your Web site when you get a chance write this down somewhere underline it in blood or lipstick or whatever you want is called a title tag.

See when somebody sits down at Google and decides to search for something it sends out these things called spiders. Well the spiders go looking for Web pages about this topic about this keyword keyword phrase. And they start at the top of the page and work down. Well the top of the page technically if you open a browser window is the little tab up at the top. There's words in there and if yours just says home page or Joe's Enterprises, that's the most important place there is. And you just screwed up because nobody's sitting down and typing, I think I'd like to find a home page to know they're looking for what they're keyword and their problem is and you've got to learn to use those title tags properly and if you're web person didn't show you how to do it properly, well they probably don't know they're probably a graphic artist and has no clue about the stuff I'm talking about.

So anyway that's one thing it's put them in the title tags. Now if you're using Wordpress which I highly suggest you should be, it's been the gold standard for years now, you can get a plugin called the All in One SEO Pack or another one called Yoast. So it just gives you a place to put stuff in and frequently you'll see the word tag. Well just think of that as keyword. OK so if it says what are your tags, you type in your keywords. A lot of times you put a comma between their keyword phrases. On blog postings the title of your blog posting is the most important place to put a keyword. Cute is OK in your blog postings that get people to click, click bait.

[00:22:51] But from the search engine perspective keywords are better. So if it's cute and has keywords that's the best of both worlds because it catches people because it's cute or catchy but it still catches you know the search engine isn't interested in cute and catchy it's interested in topics you have keywords and cute that's best. Now when you write an article try to get them in the title of the article. Yeah he got to make sure they're in the body too but don't overdo it. That's called keyword stuffing. And the search engines that's been out for over with for 15 years.

[00:23:26] Also it's better to do another video or write another article or another blog post and try to stuff a bunch of keywords into one. Now the only exception to this is an Amazon book description. Yeah you can load that up like crazy because they don't care they just want your book to get purchased. In most cases you don't want to stuff a bunch of keywords into one place because each one dilutes the value of the rest. So for instance if you had four keywords which was 100 percent of your keyword each keyword is worth 25 percent.

[00:24:06] But if you had 10 keywords which is 100 percent of your keywords each keyword is only worth 10 percent.

[00:24:13] So when Google was trying to find a web page or blog posting to raise up high in the rankings they want it to be a high percentage all about that very specific thing because Google wants the searcher, see Google hates you the website owner Google just uses you. They love the searcher. They want the searcher to be happy and come back over and over and over so they try to give them things that are exactly what they wanted and they'll come back. They did that I don't know 18 years ago now and that's why they're top of the heap in the search field. So you've got to play their game and you don't want to look like a jack of all trades by lumping tons and tons of keywords into one place because then you look like a jack of all trades you've diluted the keywords and boom you never see the light of day all you hear is crickets chirping.

When I teach search engine optimization, I used to get really specific on things like keyword density and keyword proximity but that was the old days. I mean Google is getting smarter all the time and if your search engine optimization or in other words your use of these keywords is too perfect. There really is no degrees to perfection but to Google, if your show and patterns that you're trying to game the system.

[00:25:36] You won't see the light of day so the more random things look the better. So it's actually easier to teach it how to do this now. All right. So the first thing is research the keywords. Second is to implement them and if you watch carefully you'll see more and more people will start to find you online.

Now keywords are just one slice of the giant internet pie. That's one of the reasons I started the only licensed independent internet marketing school in the country called the Internet Marketing Training Center in Virginia. That's distance learning so if you can hear my voice and understand English you can attend and do your classes any time day or night. I mean you can even be working and still attend. Some people can start making money before they finish the school because of these nuts and bolts things that are taught there.

We're certified to operate by the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. You can visit IMTCVA.org for details on how we finance your education or your child's higher education. So you're not buried in a trillion dollars in debt and all you know how to do is party. And we give you an in demand skill that will put you in line for a high paying internet marketing jobs or allow you to start your own screw the commute business or both.

[00:27:03] Now we'll have the link in the show notes also for that one. So thanks for listening. Please subscribe and leave a review. The instructions are at Screwthecommute.com. In the next episode I'll be interviewing someone who has been screwing the commute for years. This is Tom Antion saying, I'll catch you next time.

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