When you're starting out a PPC campaign, the first important step after choosing an offer to promote is keyword research. We want to find a list of long tail keywords which are essentially multi-word search queries which visitors are searching for on search engines. The reason we go after the long tails is that they are highly targeted and there's less competition for them.

Lets say we want to promote the Complete Guide to Your Dog's nutrition product at http://www.dogfooddangers.com. So our goal is to gather a list of long tail keywords related to this niche.

There are a lot of excellent keyword tools out there, like KeywordSpy, Wordtracker, etc. However, the keyword tool we're going to use, is the one included with your Google Adwords account. It is free, and very powerful. Log in to your Adwords account and you can access it from the tools menu.

Step 1
In the keyword tool, make sure that 'Website content' is checked and enter the site url in the box and click 'Get keyword ideas'

Step 2
The tool will then extract relevant keywords from the site, organized by 'Group'. Sort by 'Avg Search Volume' to get the keywords with the most searches listed first.

Step 3
In your favorite text editor, grab the top keyword from each listed group. In our example, I get dog food recipe, dog food, pet food, dog treats, food and dog. The keywords food and dog are a little too generic. We can probably eliminate them from our list.

Step 4
Now we want to see if there are any relevant forums related to our keywords. So we go to Google and and for each keyword in our list, we type 'keyword forum'.

Step 5
Visit the top forum that comes up in our Google search results and we're going to browse through the posts for additional keywords. We're looking for keywords that are not on our list and are not phrase matches to our keywords. So in our example, the forum http://www.seefido.com/dog-discussion-forum/viewforum.php?f=41 comes up. An example keyword that I see is Homemade Dog Treat Recipes. Try to look for keywords discussed by experienced forum members or on topics that get lots of replies. Not every keyword you have will have an associated forum, but lots of them do.

Step 6
Now you should have a decent list of keywords. Go back to Google with our list and type them in again, one by one. This time we're going to copy down the urls of all the ads. Why you ask? These are the sites that are actually paying for traffic using these keywords. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us. Here are some of the ad urls I gathered from one of my searches.

• YummyHealthyDogFood.com
• www.EverythingNaturalPetFood.com
• www.thehungrypuppy.com
• PetDietGuide.com
• www.DogFoodRecipes.info

Step 7
One you have your list of urls, go back to the keyword tool and follow step 1 again for all the urls. For each result, click on 'Add all...' under each relevent group to add all our keywords to the list. You'll see some duplicates, but the Adwords keyword tool will filter them out for you automatically.

Step 8
Once you've completed this process, export your list to a file and save them.

We now have a list of targeted long tail keywords, that advertisers are actually paying money for. With this list, you will able to proceed to the next part of your PPC campaign, the landing page. We'll cover that in a future hub.

If you're interested in learning more about using keywords and PPC and would like to get some hands-on PPC coaching, I would recommend checking out PPC Coach. I'm a member and they have tools to make things like keyword research a lot easier. You can also check out my PPC Coach Review hub.

Here is a list of some of my favorite keyword research tools that I personally use to find keywords for my PPC campaigns. They are all free, or have functioning free trials. The data from each tool varies depending on the source they are using. So it is always good to fire up a couple different tools and compare the results.

• My brain
  
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• KeywordSpy
• Market Samurai
• Word Tracker w/ Google Trends