It won’t take you long to come across “keywords” if you’re trying to make money online. Keywords are fundamental in almost all online activities. Even if you don’t plan to make money and just want internet fame, you can’t hide from keywords. Learning how to find profitable keywords will help you be successful.
It’s no different for Kindle publishing. Keyword research is almost 90% of your success indicator in the business. It’s not 90% of the work, but IT IS the biggest factor in deciding whether you will succeed or not. A good keyword will see you make money within the first month and a bad keyword can see your initial investment gone forever.
Publishers are always on a constant hunt for the next keyword, and there’s just a plethora of articles, videos and courses dedicated on teaching people how to find great keywords. The problem is, and I’m sure you already know. Everyone is saying the same thing.
By the time you’ve consumed 10 of these tutorials, articles, guides etc. You can pretty much predict what the 11th one is going to be.
Exactly the same as the previous 10.
And there’s a reason for this. Most people who are writing, recording or creating these guides are still in the business and don’t want to give away ALL the tricks of the trade. It’s not to say what they are saying isn’t true. It is, but they just fail to provide the most important parts.
I’m going to give you 3 methods that are a lot more effective.
It took some deliberating on my part to finally write this post. I went back and forth on whether I would shoot myself in the foot in the future, but I already decided at the end of 2017 I will be taking a step back from Kindle publishing and focusing on other projects. One of the big reasons was to follow the 3 rules of money of wealth creation. One rule being to have multiple streams of income, and since publishing has already grown to a very steady income stream for me. It’s about time for me to focus on my other income streams.
That means, I’m about to tell you what took me a whole lot of trial and error to find out in this one post. You will save yourself so much failure, money and time if you read this and digest all this information properly.
The usual keyword research advice
Before I give you my extra input, let’s have a run down on the usual advice you can find on the internet. It’s all true, it’s not like they don’t work at all. They just might not be the most effective ways.
Method 1: Use the Amazon Kindle bestseller charts
Go on Amazon.com and find the Kindle department so you can find the “bestseller” charts. The bestseller chart could be for Kindle ebooks as a whole or you can narrow it down by subcategories. Such as History, Computers & Technology and Romance.
The bestseller lists consist of the top 100 accordingly and the conventional idea was to go through all 100 to identify trends in the titles names. Most of the time, keywords start popping up and deductive reasoning would suggest these keywords are profitable. If you don’t see terms repeating, your next step would be to note a few down and manually search them in the Kindle store to see whether they were good keywords or not.
In theory this works, but in practice you will soon learn it’s not the most effective way. Yes, you will find keywords. You will find them comparatively easily, but most of the time these keywords are highly competitive and are not the ones you want to publish in. That’s because keywords that repeatedly appear in the top 100 for it’s category indicate they’re too competitive.
What do I mean by too competitive. I mean these keywords have a constant onslaught of new publications being produced. The result is, your book won’t last in the long term, without constant and regular support.
Method 2: Use the Amazon Kindle search suggestions
The idea is for you to type in a basic form of a keyword and let the search bar create suggestions to give you longtail keywords. The most common longtail keywords are “…for beginners”. Which in many cases actually do give you great results. This method is pretty effective for narrowing down on a broad keyword that may still have less competitive smaller keywords.
The only limitation for this is, the suggestions Amazon provides are only add-on terms at the back of what you inputted. There’s no way for you to find the longtail keywords where the add-on terms are at the front. Another limitation is that this only works when you have a great basic keyword. It won’t work if you put any random keyword in and look for a longtail version of it.
You’re pretty much going in blind.
Method 3: Start brainstorming
Brainstorm. This is the most useless and the most common method suggested by kindle gurus everywhere. They tell you to brainstorm topics and just cross check them to see if any work. Again, it does work. But the process is painfully slow and it’s pretty much like hitting in the dark.
Nothing about this method is efficient or effective. And one of the biggest flaws to this method is, you’re limited to your own creativity.
The truth is, most of us will come up with very similar keywords and most of these keywords would have already been dominated by older, more experienced publishers.
Brainstorming isn’t going to be your best bet at finding a profitable keyword if you’re not someone with a vast knowledge of quirky hobbies, facts and know-how.
If you are though.
Then brainstorm away, because you have a unique advantage of knowing things most people don’t. A.K.A your keywords are easier to protect in the long run.
Okay, so the above are the methods you find everywhere, in every article, video and course. Now it’s time for me to share with you my sage advice on finding profitable keywords.
My advice on how to find keywords
Method 1: Find bundles that are selling
Kindle bundles have been a phenomenon that’s heavily encouraged by a famous Kindle course and as a result it’s become a normal publishing practice in the industry. Bundles are everywhere in the kindle store. These bundles consist of more than one single book in the same niche compiled together. You see 2, 3, 4 book bundles and sometimes even more when you’re looking at fiction books. And each book holds a potentially profitable keyword.
This means, if you find a bundle that is selling, you can dissect it for it’s single book titles to find great keywords.
The way you find bundles is by searching for broad keywords. In some cases niches would be the keyword for the bundle. Bundles won’t be using more specific keywords and instead will go broader. The reason for this is because the bundle keyword must still be relevant to each and every single book keyword.
Method 2: Use Author pages
This is a great trick to finding keywords or at least inspiration for possible keywords.
Whenever you come across a book that’s selling well, click on the author page and see what other titles they have. Most of the time it won’t provide any specific keywords, but you will find a lot of different niches you’ve never heard about or thought about. This trick has helped me so much in finding keywords for topics I never knew even existed.
It’s a great way to find leads in the right direction.
Method 3: Clear your cookies and cache regularly or use incognito on google chrome
You have to do this if you’re on Amazon a lot. A browsing history on the site will heavily influence the results Amazon shows you, and this could get you into a keyword pit hole. It’ll stop you from finding anything new or exciting because Amazon is only showing you things they think you want, which is pretty much all the bad keywords you crossed off on your list before.
Clear your cookies or simply do your keyword research in incognito mode on Google chrome. I was amazed the first time I started doing this. The results were different and the suggestions Amazon gave me were more diversified and varied. I’ve found a few keywords because of this.
Having a clean slate every time you research keywords is a big thumbs up in finding something new.
And those are my 3 methods to finding profitable keywords faster and easier than what everyone else is teaching. Now here’s the catch.
Not all profitable keywords are keywords you want to publish in. There’s a specific way to determine if a keyword is worth your time or not, and I provide an easy checklist to identify these worthwhile keywords within my Kindle publishing course here.
You’ll get my over-the-shoulder Kindle lesson that shows you exactly how I find profitable keywords and goes through all the steps in detail with you. I provide real examples of good keywords and bad keywords, which I find in real time.
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Other resources that you should check out:
- Top 10 profitable Kindle niches that are evergreen
- Find keywords faster with KindleSpy keyword software. It pulls up all the stats and numbers in one convenient box so you don’t have to click and scroll to look for them.
- Can you still make money with Kindle publishing?
