Lots of people are looking for ways to help out their finances in these difficult economic times, and end up searching online for ways to make ends meet financially. Writing articles for to drive traffic to your affiliate offers is one of the ways that you can greatly improve your finances without having a rich relative pass away and leave you in his will.

Articles you write should be keyed to specific long-tail key phrases in order to appear on the first page or two of Google – and it is essential that you target long-tail key phrases that are popular enough to drive a sufficient amount of website traffic yet non-competitive enough to end up on the first page or two of Google.

This is a tricky task, but can be done easily if you know how to go about it. Using Google’s keyword tool can locate the keyword phrases you need – and will also tell you how many searches are conducted for that phrase each month. Selecting good phrases that have at least 100 searches every day will be the most valuable to you. Simply doing a search on that phrase will show how many web pages show up for that long-tail keyword phrase – and anything less than 1 million is worth taking a look at. If you can find long-tail keyword phrases that have less than 1,000 competing websites, yet has over 100 searches every day – you’ve struck a financially profitable keyword.

Now – here’s a trick that you'll not often see – if you want to distinguish how many webpages are targeting for your preferred long-tail keyword phrase, simply type intitle:"keyword phrase" – but be alert – Google will disclose to you something similar to this:

Results 1-10 of about 1,880 for intitle:"affiliate marketing system"

But if you’re smart, you’ll go to the end of the search results, and click over to the final search result page… where you’ll see a much more exact reported outcome – and many times it will be drastically different… here’s the end result for the same search above:

Results 121-128 of 128 for intitle:"affiliate marketing system"

Rather a huge variation, wouldn’t you say? So be vigilant – if you don’t try out the last page, you may bypass a entirely good long-tail keyword phrase that you were led to believe has too much competition.

Writing articles to drive profitable traffic to the affiliate product of your choice will normally result in sales of up to 3% or more. For every 100 people you drive to a affiliate sales page, you ought to be able to pick up 3 sales. If you end up with less than a three percent sales – you’ve selected the wrong affiliate program to sell, or your long tail key word phrases are badly chosen.