Not all long tail keywords are equal.

Some have searches but hundreds or even thousands of pages competing for them – the chance of you getting ranked for those anytime soon is next to zero.

Others come up in the suggestions but have next to no competition.

The clue here is that they show in the suggestions – that means people are actually searching for the phrases that show up. And, because Google is suggesting the phrase, they’ll select it and click on it.

That’s what you need for niche (or affiliate) marketing – quick wins.

So far, probably nothing you don’t already know (regardless of whether you’re using the method or not).

But how can you easily find out how many other competing pages there are?

Google won’t tell you with a regular search.

You’ll need to add the word:

allintitle:

(including the colon at the end) to your search, immediately followed by your chosen phrase. No space after the colon.

No need to put the words in quotes as that would force Google to look for them in that order.

Just put them in the search as you’d normally type.

Then see how many pages show up.

Sometimes there will be hundreds – move on from these, they’re not worth your time and effort.

Sometimes there will be tens – up to you with these. I’m happy-ish between about 10 and 50, not much more than that.

And sometimes you hit pay dirt – single figure results or even none at all.

You should be grabbing these keywords – they’re gold dust.

Think about it:

• The phrase is being searched for – the fact it comes up in the list means precisely that
• Next to no-one is specifically targeting the phrase
• You’ve got a fantastic opportunity to create an article (500 words or more) with that phrase as the title. Give Google time to index the page and sift it for the search results and, in a couple of months, you should start getting traffic.

Rinse and repeat.

I just spent about half an hour doing just this and came up with 15 keyword phrases that I should be able to rank for on page one because near enough no-one is targeting them so I likely don’t need to do any “promotion” of the page apart from publishing it.

More than enough to fill my quota for the week on the sites I was researching (my aim on them is one new article every 1 – 5 days depending on the site)

You can do the same and then either write the article yourself or get someone on iWriter to do it for you.

And if you need more help with affiliate marketing, check out my program here.