subject: What's The Most Important Internet Marketing Skill? [print this page] What's The Most Important Internet Marketing Skill?
I spend a lot of time talking to people who are trying to get started in Internet marketing and one question that they tend to ask me over and over again is; what's the most important Internet marketing skill that they should develop early on?
This is a very tricky question because there are several key areas that I think everybody should spend some time developing.
These things include article marketing, keyword research and search engine optimization, as well as e-mail marketing and copywriting.
If I had to pick the most important out of that list, I would probably choose keyword research because it not only allows you to gain thousands, if not tens of thousands of free highly targeted leads straight from the search engines but it also helps clarify your mind and laser focus on specific items and in marketing it's really all about that, staying focused based on market data.
I can't tell you the number of times I've come across people who are starting a new business online because they've got an idea. The problem is, their idea is not based in any type of reality.
They think that the very cute purple dog collars that they have invented are going to take the world by storm and all they have to do is build a website and before you know it they'll be selling thousands of them.
The problem is, they haven't done any research and if they had even done some basic keyword research they may have discovered that nobody searches for purple dog collars but thousands of people search for magenta dog collars.
That one stupid little change could have been the difference between them making a fortune online and them not making a penny and in fact losing their life savings in the process trying to market a product that nobody's interested in.
And it all comes down to simple, free, and relatively easy keyword research that anybody could have done in less than five minutes.
So if you ask me what the most important Internet marketing skill is or in fact marketing skill period, I'd have to say unreservedly that it is keyword research. Now we could spend hours talking about the best way to go about keyword research but if you're just getting started, the very best thing to do is simply fire up Google's free keyword analysis tool that you can find online by searching at Google for keyword tool.
Spend an afternoon playing with it and getting to know how it works. If you do just that and nothing more you'll be ahead of like 90% of the rest of the marketers in the world today.
