subject: Uneducated Internet Marketers - Intermediate Keyword Research [print this page] Uneducated Internet Marketers - Intermediate Keyword Research
As we move a little deeper into the all-important topic of keyword research, remember to get in the habit of revisiting your Top Ten list. If you don't know what you're Top Ten are, these are the Top Ten reasons for not ever quitting! They are different for each of us, so be honest and true to yourself. Money is an obvious one, but what about your children, grandchildren, the need for freedom and independence in your day to day life? Maybe you just want a really cool boat, or that custom chopper with the chrome and the ground effects in dark green. Pretty specific, huh? I just saw that bike not long ago and the image hasn't left my head. Anyway, let's get to it.
One of the first things we tell people before they start pumping cash into their campaigns is to do your keyword research and have a plan. Moving ahead too quickly without direction fast becomes a very expensive lesson in due diligence. Believe me, you will know when the time is right to strike at a market opportunity because you will be making intelligent decisions based on real data, not emotional reaction to the first thing that pops in your head. In a recent article we spoke about starting with keyword phrases and the first steps in researching your chosen phrases for your market. One of the keyword seminars we attended focused a great deal on a very important problem - internet search engines are saturated with internet marketers all trying to crawl quickly up the ranks on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Bing, and so on. You more than likely figured this out pretty quickly when you typed in "internet marketing" or "start up your own online business" into the search bar. Literally millions of competing sites pop up over thousands of pages, and being the new business, presumably without huge start up capital and resources, you're going to be invisible.
"The longest journey begins with just one step." I don't know who said that, but when it was said, there was no internet and there was no Google. But it's as true now as it was then. Start small and 'learn' how to grow. This undertaking is no get rich quick scam so get used to some hard work for a little while, but that doesn't mean we have to work stupidly. Focus on who we want typing in our final keyword selection, we want buyers, not browsers. Thinking about creative ways to narrow your keywords down to a lucrative niche or two can be a daunting thought at first, but after a few tireless nights scouring through the facts,
things can become a lot more clear, and you might be very surprised at what you come up with.
Each group of words you come up with should have its own file either on your computer or in a manila file somewhere, for all of us old heads out there. You may find that tweaking your phrase choice a little can go a long way, like "internet marketing for stay at home moms" or "online money making opportunity for single fathers." Notice these phrases are not just two or three words, but are base keywords with added words to narrow down the search a little more, known as long-tail keywords. Consider what you know the most about. Who is your target market to be? If you owned a small business maybe you'd like to target business owners, or former real estate agents and stock brokers. The point is, narrow the field down to carve out yourself a niche where there aren't millions of others jockeying for rank.
Consider typing in various geographic locations throughout the country, or world for that matter, such as "internet marketing for stay at home moms in Boston."
Get creative, dig in, and do your research and never, ever quit. You can't imagine what the payoff will be for your efforts.
