When most people think of keywords, the immediate association is search engine optimization. Almost always spoken of in terms of their ability to boost traffic, keywords are generally words or phrases relevant to a given piece of content or business.
However, ebook authors can use keywords for another critical purpose, one with the potential to lead to more sales.
Consider if you would, this hidden benefit of keyword research.
Topic Suggestion
Let’s say you have a burning desire to write an ebook, but you have no idea what you should write about. If you’re adept at research, a good way to decide upon a topic is to conduct a round of keyword analysis first. Just as you would to create a website you want to see rank as highly as possible, employing keyword research to inform ebook topic creation can help you discover what people are most interested in learning. If you’re a good researcher and can compile a useful tome around any subject, your odds of selling will increase, because you’ve found a ready market for your book—before you write it.
Find An Angle
Alternatively, let’s say you’re an expert in a particular field, or simply have a strong interest in it. You might have several ideas for books, but you’re having trouble deciding which route would be the best one to take. Conducting a keyword analysis of the subject can reveal trends in the area of which you may have been unaware. These in turn could lead you to a viable angle. Having a solid idea of what people want to know about the topic will give you a great head start toward creating something useful—and profitable.
Saves Time and Focuses Your Effort
Using keyword analysis this way saves you a lot of time and wasted energy writing something about which few people have an interest. Basing your topic ideas around keyword research gives you a built-in audience of people who will find it relevant. When you’re selling ebooks, this information can be invaluable, as it can guide the rest of your research and help you create the exact book people want to buy.
Trend Insights
Using the Google Correlate tool for conducting keyword analysis is another way to figure out what people want to read about. “Correlate” can be used to find associations between search trends and any other data point you’d like to reference. Let’s say you’re planning to author a cookbook and you tell Google Correlate to analyze the keyword “baking”. Taking into consideration the top terms associated with the term will help you determine what type of baking cookbook is most likely to find takers.
Marketing The Finished Product
When your book is based on popular keywords, marketing becomes easier as well. In most cases, authors write books and then look for the appropriate keywords to market them. If you research the keywords first and write the book based upon your findings, your marketing keywords are already identified when it’s time to sell. All you’ll have to do is craft promotions based around them. Remarkably, even though it’s common practice, operating the other way around is essentially putting the cart before the horse.
The hidden benefit of keyword research for authors is a much more useful book. Let’s face it, while you might you have a great idea, there’s no guarantee the reading public will embrace it. If you take some time to learn what people want to know before you write, the finished product stands a better chance of being something people will appreciate and—most of all—buy. So, before you begin your book, take some time to conduct market research using keywords as your guide.
