Idea for Affiliates: Peel Merchant's Inventory

If you are running out of ideas of how to promote a merchant, here’s something you can do: peel their inventory to arrive at long tail key phrases to target.

Say, you are promoting a footwear merchant that has an extensive inventory of different brands and kinds of shoes. Let’s take Zappos for example, and suppose we decided to narrow our focus to just loafers:

Now let’s go to Google AdWords Keyword Tool, and narrow our focus even further — by color. I’ve searched for red, black, white and tan loafers, and black is by far the most popular color among these four. Here’s the data:

How can you use this information now?

1. Paid Search Campaigns – The most obvious way is to start bidding on “shoes black loafers”, “black leather loafers”, “women’s black loafers”, and other long-tail key phrases.

The less frequently used techniques that I myself have found to be of great effectiveness (while promoting Langbridge) are:

2. Keyword-Rich Domains – While someone is sitting on the BlackLoafers.com domain not monetizing it in any way (unfortunate, but very common), BlackLoafer.com is still free, and so are longer tail key phrases that you can use right in the domain names. If you then use your keyword-rich domain to build a website centered around the very keywords that appear in the domain name, you will soon start getting some good organic traffic. On obvious reasons, I will not give you the exact domain names, but some of the 3-word domains I registered and developed for Langbridge are now in the top 10 rankings (out of 2 mln+ other webpages) on Google, Yahoo, MSN and other SE’s.

3. Long Tail Blogging – Another technique that affiliates can use is blogging about the frequently-searched-for products (or services), or putting together webpages that are optimized for ranking well on these key phrases. It is a common technique used by bloggers in general, and more affiliates should be taking advantage of it.

So, peel those inventories, and monetize the knowledge.