For many marketers, doing PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns is a daunting and tedious task. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack of competition. After nearly a year of avoiding PPC and only using social media to drive traffic, I finally decided to face my Goliath and “take’ em down”.

The result?

After a few hours of playing around with a few basic free tools and $7 of test money, I learned very quickly that my Goliath of a challenge was really not as big of a deal as I thought.

What I found was a simple, wise investment of my time and money, and a proven massive traffic-driving machine. Below is a video I made to help you discover the basics of keyword “research” (sounds so scientific and complex doesn’t it?).

Step-by Step:

Go to Google and search for the free Google keyword research tool

You want to start off by looking at the very MAIN keyword that you are targeting or that you have in mind.

Type in your keyword.

What you will see is all the keywords that people are searching. When you go through all the keywords you want to look at the ones that are relevant and related to your main keyword. Not all of these will fit what you’re targeting. Sometimes keywords are very general. You don’t want to bid on these because you’re not going to get very targeted viewers.

For example, if you were to search for the word “crafts”, you’re not going to get the target audience you want and you’ll be wasting clicks on people who aren’t looking for you.

Go through these keywords and sift through the ones that are related to what you are offering. Make sure you take the time and look through these keyword combinations and add them to your list.

Once you click on the ones you want, you can go ahead and press download so you can compile your list. Now you have your list of keywords that we want to work on.

Go to Word Pot and do the same thing.

Copy and paste and add the ones that you see relevant to your notepad list.

You can also use Word Tracker, another free tool for you.

Go there now. And if you see ones you like, you do the same thing and add it to your list.

Do this again and again with the tools I’ve provided for you in the video.

After you have all your keywords, you want to go back to your list and check out the most relevant keywords that relate to your target and dig deeper for more combinations of that keyword.

Go into Word Tracker and look for a relevant keyword. Click on it and see what you get.

Once you click on it you see that it diggs deeper into keywords that have those word combinations in them.

Now you have more keywords to add to your list.

Try this using the free Google tool and see if you can dig deeper into these combinations. Once you have all the keywords you want on your list, go through it one more time and sift through it for irrelevant ones that got through.

Once you have a compiled list from the different tools, you want to clean your list of duplicates, odd characters, bad words, etc. Chances are you’re going to have some duplicates so you’re going to want to make sure you don’t have any.

You can use this free tool (browser tool) or this tool (PC download). You’ll be saving yourself a lot of time using this than sifting through your list manually.

Copy and paste your list on this tool to scrub it of duplicates.

Once you have this list of clean, targeted keywords, you can plug them into your marketing campaigns, whether it be for PPC campaigns or SEO strategies.

As a reminder, this is basic keyword research. There are plenty of tools out there that you can use to help you with your research, but when you’re starting out, FREE proves to be VERY helpful.

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