A Practical Lesson in the Importance of Keyword Research

If you want to earn up-front payments from Associated Content, it is vital that you do a little keyword research in advance. Here is a practical lesson I learned before I figured out how to use Google’s Keyword Research tool.

Topical Subject

With the coming of Mother’s Day, I knew that it would be good to write something related to mom. Because many people have rocky relationships with Mom, I decided to do a piece about the importance and benefits of forgiving your mother for her neglect or lack of mothering skills.

The Article

The article I wrote was called “How to Forgive Your Mother”. Initially, I received the following rejection:

Thank you for this submission. AC gets most of its traffic from search queries; while this content is unique, it does not qualify for a higher Upfront Payment offer because it does not match something a Web user would search for online.

Keyword Research

This happened before I knew how to research keywords at Google. I did come across a freelance project that asked for a document with the keyword, “childhood trauma”. If someone was willing to pay for an article with this keyword, it made sense that AC would probably pay me for it too. I changed the title to “Childhood Trauma and Forgiving Your Mother”. I dispersed the keyword “childhood trauma”; in three places in the article, including one title heading, then resubmitted the piece to AC.

Results

This time AC offered me an upfront payment of $2.86 with no problems for the same article, only using a better keyword. Not the max $4 you can get, but not bad. Now that I know about the Google Keyword Research tool, I can go on over research keywords. In searching “childhood trauma,” the most popular keywords in this niche are:

• neglect
• child neglect
• neglected
• neglect abuse
• nurturing
• child abuse neglect
• neglect and abuse
• child abuse and neglect
• neglected children
• neglecting
• childhood trauma

My selection of “childhood trauma” was not a bad choice, but I just stumbled onto it by chance. I probably would have done even better had I included “Neglect” in the title. I wanted to share this practical lesson in the importance of keyword research with you. The same content with essentially the same information will not be successful if you use the wrong words to attract readers.