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With every passing day, the internet becomes a more and more competitive marketing ground. It can be ridiculously difficult to break into a niche you may be really interested in.

For example, I love video games as most other young male adults do, and I could easily and passionately work on this topic if I wanted to; but do you really think it would be easy to go up against the big guys like GameSpot, IGN, GameSpy, GameTrailers, and 1UP? Heck, that’s just a small sampling of the huge competition in this niche.

It’s not something I can just work on and expect results. The competition is just to huge.

What a lot of people don’t realize though is that there are plenty of different ways of targeting subsets of these popular niches, and getting big results. This is where the concept of the long tail keywords comes into play.

It’s pretty safe to say that when you are targeting a niche, you want to be the number 1 result when it comes to either search engine results, or pay per click advertising. That’s why the less competition, obviously the easier it becomes to dominate this keyword (which is also your niche subset).

Check out this graph to understand further:

Even though you target keywords with less searches, the competition is also a lot lower. You will get a LOT more hits from a #1 spot on a low searched keyword than from spot #100 on a very popular keyword.

Not only that, but your traffic now becomes hyper targeted to your specific niche subset.

Here’s a great example I found today. You could really use this if you wanted to, so long as you could find a way to monetize it.

I’ll show you the entire process I went though to get to this possibly profitable long tail keyword:

Using the Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion tool, I searched a fairly broad niche to start, but one that I knew would give me some good ideas.

I searched Golf Clubs, which on it’s own would be extraordinarily difficult to compete in. Now within those results, I found this:

Wordtracker reports 242 searches a day for this keyword. That’s pretty nice! If you were the top position in Google for this term, you’d be likely to get quite a bit of natural traffic! But, now let’s take a rough estimate of competition by simply searching for the keyword in Google:

While vastly less competitive than Golf Clubs at 15,700,000, Callaway Golf Clubs’ 445,000 is easier, but still could be a very tough challenge. Also, that was with a broad match. With a phrase match (within quotes), Callaway Golf Clubs still turned up 289,000 results.

I don’t know about you, but I want something even easier, which will still result in profits. So, we can go a level deeper. Now, again using the Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion tool, I searched for Callaway Golf Clubs, in order to get subsets of that niche. Here’s what I found:

Callaway x 14 golf club is definitely a keyword we could profit from, by selling the club itself. So, let’s check the competition:

143,000 is still a bit high in theory, but this is much more achievable. Further proof is in the fact that a phrase match of this keyword only returns 1,070 results.

That means that there is a lot of fluff in those 143,000 results. This is shaping up to be an easy keyword to rank for! And at 6 searches a day, meaning somewhere around 180 searches a month, you could easily make a few sales a month!

(Just a note, these search numbers are quite theoretical, because without Wordtracker’s Full Service, which you can try free for 7 days here, it is a pretty rough estimate. You will get deeper keyword research data with the paid membership.)

This is also a pretty powerful keyword on it’s own. If someone searches for “Callaway x 14 golf club”, they could easily be potential buyers. The more narrow your search terms become, while their may be less competition, as well as demand, you will actually have more targeted visitors!

Even crazier is the fact that Callaway x14 golf club (without the space between x and 14) returns only 9,030 (and only 9 phrase matches!). This is a misspelled keyword, as Google actually shows this when you search it.

But that doesn’t mean that people won’t see a #1 result before realizing this! And there’s even some Wordtracker search data:

(Here is a keyword misspellings tool: http://tools.seobook.com/spelling/keywords-typos.cgi)

So as you can see, you really can dig deeper and deeper into small sub-niches (long tail keywords) that will not only be easy to dominate, but still be able to yield profits!

Now a very important point to add: just because a search term has low competition, it doesn’t mean it will automatically be easy to rank for! Same thing goes for high ranking terms too, they could possibly be easier to rank for than you’d think.

That’s why there are extra steps needed to ensure that a long tail keyword really means easy profits. Wordtracker, or any keyword research data really, can only help so much. They give a great starting point, but it is important to see what you are REALLY up against.

So stay tuned for more of this mini-series on Targeting Long Tail Keywords for Easy Profits!

(Read Part 2, Long Tail Keyword Competition)

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