Ok, so I’ve signed up for the Instacash keyword research service. Well, actually the 5 buck trial for a week. Click Here to try it for five bucks.

I get 7 emails with a “killer” niche and bundle of “killer” keywords attached. Or at least, that’s the plan.

It’s been a while since my first few posts as I’ve been having a bit of time off from marketing. My mothers in intensive care and I’m travelling a couple hundred miles round trip every other day to see her. Fingers crossed!

I wrote a spreadsheet to automatically verify the individual keywords. How many searches, how much competition etc. And there were a lot of discrepancies.

I thought at first this was down to poor research on the services part but then I remembered when I started my first campaign and posted a load of articles via an article posting service. The competition results change drastically overnight.

I’ll explain further. I use a couple of services to post my articles to hundreds of sites. These services aren’t cheap but they are very effective. The beauty of them though is they send out a totally unique version of your article to each site. Click here for a bit more info on these services.

I’ve often had 5 or 6 spots on the first page of Google occupied by my articles on various sites round the world. They don’t always stay there though. Google drops them after a while.

So, what I’m saying is this, if the service said a keyword had competion of (say) 3000 sites and you check and it says more, I wouldn’t worry too much about that. The only thing you need worry about is the first ten entries on Google, and can you compete, or do better than them.

What did really open my eyes with this service is the niches they are recommending. Some are fairly obvious choices but some I would never have thought of in a million years.

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I was also concerned about saturation. If there are (say) 500 people getting these lists, am I competing with them and are they more experienced than me, therefore blowing me out of the water.

I’ve had 60 lists so far. In each list there’s around 30 to 50 keywords. So I’ve got around 2000 keywords to play with. I very much doubt I’m going to have an awful lot of competition from people getting the same lists. Even if I do get some competition I’m sure I can live with it.

In fact what I’m doing now is using these list as a guide to finding my own keywords. New keywords that aren’t on the lists. And so far I’m pretty pleased with results.

I was using 2 bits of keyword software before these lists. I was using Market Samurai and Keyword Elite.  I’ve binned these two and am now using a program called Traffic Travis. It’s made by Mark Ling of Affilorama fame and I love it’s ease of use. Far easier than anything else I’ve used. Check out the ‘Tools I Use‘ page for more info about it.

I’ve also used Adwords Analyzer and to be honest I think it absolutely stinks. It was the first bit of keyword software I bought and it had me tearing my hair out for months.

Back to the Instacash keyword lists. The format is a .pdf with a list of keywords, their relevant search count per month and then the number of competitors. Like I mentioned earlier you must take these figures with a pinch of salt. Search & competition figures seem to change (sometimes wildy) overnight.

Also in the .pdf is an Instacash Insight, or a bit of waffle on how to best capitalise on the keywords. Some of these insights are pretty good and some are clearly just filler. But hey, we can’t all be perfect.

Will I use these Instacash list for ever? Probably not but I will keep them going for a while yet. If only to save me time and effort in finding new niches.

Let’s boil it down to what benefits these lists can give you. At ninety dollars a month they aint cheap. But divide that by 30 days and you are looking at about 3 dollars a day. My current level of skill means it would take me around one to two hours to put a list like this together.

So on average I’m getting about an hour and a half worth of work every day for slightly less than 3 dollars. In anyone’s eyes that has got to be value for money.

Would I recommend the Instacash service. Yes & no. No if you are a keyword research machine already, as this probably won’t do anything for you. A definite yes if you struggle for keywords and are looking for value for money.

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