I’ve been promoting a high end coaching/marketing program that is going to be released soon by Mike Filsaime and Chris Farrell called “Affiliate Dot Com”.

As I have been discussing this launch, I thought it would be a great opportunity to give you my own personal thoughts and experiences with spending good money on higher end coaching programs.

Here’s a video to share my thoughts:

If your interested in checking out the Affiliate Dot Com program use this link:

http://www.affiliatedotcom1.com

I shot this video to tell you about the Marketers Cruise coming up this January.

There’s an endless amount of reasons as to why I think this is the absolute BEST thing you can do to further your career as an Internet Marketer.

Join me and over 300 of the TOP internet marketers on this years. Marketers cruise.

Go here to learn more and signup: http://www.marketingcruisevacation.com

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, internet marketing event, marketers cruise

I’ve had a really great few weeks both personally and business wise so I wanted to create this quick video to tell you more about what’s been going on.

I also wanted to give everyone out there some moral support and to let you know that success doesn’t come easy but once you figure things out, it get’s much easier and a lot more fun!

Keep working hard, implementing and trying new things and when you know something works, do more of it!

Here’s the video:

There are tools available to help us with this, some are paid and some are free, so for the sake of this article we are going to focus on the free tools, which are going to be all we need to get the job done.

The first step is to figure out what keyword we want to examine.  After you pick your most promising keyword, were going to go back to our old friend Google and just type it in to the search box.

After you type in your keyword were going to look at the amount of search results which is displayed in the top right hand corner of the page before any of the listings.  You should see something that reads “Results 1-10 of about (number) for (keyword term).

The total results is going to be one of the numbers that we look at to determine the competition.  It’s not the most important, however it does give us a general idea of how many websites have that term on their site.

The more important result that we want to find is going to be using an “exact match” search.  To do this type in your search phrase into google, just like you did last time, but now put quotation marks around it.  So if I’m going to search the term: beginner guitar lessons, it’s going to look like this “beginner guitar lessons”.

What this type of search tells us is how many website are targeting this term.   Without quotes, google will display a website as a result if that term shows up in any variation anywhere on the site.  When you use quotes it tells google to only display websites that use that specific term in the exact order you tell it.  This gives us a much better idea of how many sites are actively trying to get ranked for this specific term.

At the time of this article, beginner guitar lessons returned 12,500,000 results. That’s a huge number and if every one of those sites was trying to rank for that term, the competition would be fierce and not worth the effort.  However when I search for it using “beginner guitar lessons” it returns 130,000 results.  Although this is still a high number, it gives me a much better idea of the amount of websites that are targeting this term.

As a basic rule of thumb, anything that has an exact match result of 10,000 or less is going to be quite easy to rank for.  100,000 or less will most likely be moderately difficult and anything above 100,000 is going to be difficult and time consuming.

The last factor to determine your competition, and possible the most important, is to literally just go to the website and check it out.  Visit the top ten listings for your keyword term and get a feel for how well optimized these pages are for selling products or services.

You would be surprised to find some niches where the top results are there just because no one who truly understands SEO has gone in and dominated the keywords.

Before you disregard a keyword or think that it will be too hard to rank for, make sure you do all the steps listed above to determine your competition.

Technorati Tags: how to rank in google, seo, seo competition

Remember that the main goal here is to find action words that describe a person in need and wanting to solve a problem.  The first thing that you will most likely want to do is get rid of any terms that have the word “FREE” in them.  As you can imagine, if someone types into Google “free guitar lessons”, it’s not going to do me much good to try and focus on them as a person who is going to pay for my product or service.

As you go through your list try and find phrases that are as descriptive as possible and micro target your potential customers.  Remember that broad terms are not going to do you much good because they are #1 hard to rank for and #2 hard to turn into paying customers.

See if you can put together a list of about 30 or so words that seem like good action phrases.  Some good examples of action phrases would be “need guitar lessons”, “learn to play guitar fast”, “ease back pain”, “how to plan a wedding”. You can see how these phrases promote action and show a need to solve a problem or find a solution.  A good example of keywords that would NOT be good would be: “electric guitar”, “back pain”, “weddings”. As you can tell these are too general and don’t promote any specific need.

After you swift through the keywords that are not going to do you much good, the next step is to determine how much traffic is there and how much competition is there.

The answer to the first question “how much traffic is there” is a pretty easy one.  The search volume number is going to give you a pretty accurate idea of how many people typed that phrase into google during any given month.

If your wondering “how many searches is a lot?” we’ll that depends on what your looking for.  If your trying to target a local segment for a physical business or service that you offer in your town or city, having a low number is not a big deal.  If your promoting a product or service that can be distributed anywhere, such as an information product, then the more the merrier.

Generally speaking if you can work with keywords that have search volumes in the tens of thousands, your in good shape.  A big factor though in deciding which terms to focus on is what were going to talk about next…

Determining your competition.

Technorati Tags: keyword research, seo, traffic generation

Like any skilled trade, Keyword Research has it’s own set of tools to get the job done.  Some are free and some are paid however the free tools that are available will provide you with PLENTY of information to get up and running.

In fact, our friends at Google, the very big machine that we are trying to beat, provides us with all the information were going to need, and it’s FREE!

The main tool to get acquainted with is the “Google Adwords Keyword Tool” and you can find it by using this url: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The first step to take is to type in your main keyword in the box in the middle of the page.  Although you will want to go back and do this multiple times with different keywords, it’s good to start out with a more general term at first.  This is because the keyword tool will give you many different variations and other phrases that you might not have thought of that are relative to your niche.

After you hit the “Get keyword ideas” button, you will then see all the keywords that the tool finds along with information on search volume, advertiser competition and estimated cost per click. It’s important to note here that one of the main reasons this tool was created was for people who advertise with the Google Adwords system.  Although it’s a good thing to use, we are not going to talk about it in this article.

The main data that we want from this tool is the Search Volume numbers. You have two results to look at, Local Volume and Global Volume. To keep things simple, take the two numbers and average them out, this will give you a basic idea of how many people typed that term into Google in any given month.

Before you get the overwhelming feeling of data overload and the intimidating feeling of “what do I do with all this information”, take a step back and relax.  The next step to take is to save all this info so that we can analyze it in the future.  At the bottom of all the results, you have the ability to download the list of keywords into an excel document.  This is a great feature and will allow us to use Excel to keep our information organized.

Now what you should do is go through your list of phrases that you created earlier and get results for each term.  Yes you are going to have a lot of keywords to look at but don’t feel overwhelmed.  First of all there are going to be a lot of duplicate phrases because all our terms are going to be relative to eachother so it’s a good idea to go through and delete any duplicates.

To keep things focused, just go through your list and collect data. In the next article we will talk about how to analyze the data and find our golden keywords that we want to target.

Technorati Tags: how to, keyword research, keyword tools

This is because it helps you attract people that are looking exactly for what you have to offer, which will in turn make it much easier to close a sale and give them what they want.

Using what’s called Long Tail Keywords, which are basically words or phrases that are made up of more than 3 words, you will be able to bring in more targeted and qualified traffic to your website.

Another benefit to working with long tail instead of short keyword phrases is that they are usually much cheaper to advertise with and have less competition when it comes to SEO and getting your site to rank for the terms.

We’ll use “Guitar Lessons” as our example niche again. If I decide to try and advertise on the keyword “guitar lessons”, I will most likely find that it’s going to cost me more per click (pay per click advertising will be discussed in the near future) and I will be getting a very broad range of people to my website.  The other harsh side of working with short keywords is that they are almost always impossible to rank for using SEO.  It would most likely take years and tons of work to get my website ranked in the search engines for the term “guitar lessons”.

Let’s dig a little deeper into our example…

The product that I have teaches beginners how to play rock music. So you can imagine that if a person came to my site looking for “guitar lessons” and they are interested in learning acoustic folk guitar, then I have a pretty slim chance of making a sale.

So the smart thing to do would be to target the keyword phrase “beginner rock guitar lessons”.  You can instantly see how if someone typed that phrase into Google and my website showed up right in front of them, then I would have a much higher chance of selling them my product.

Of course there is going to be a much smaller amount of traffic available with long tail keywords but again, it’s going to be highly targeted and ultra focused on your ideal prospect.

The best thing to do for your business, product or service is to write down a list of all the terms and phrases that people would most likely type in to a search engine to find what you have to offer.  Then dig deeper and add words that describe specific aspects to what you have to offer.  Are you just a “doctor” or are you a “children’s dentist in New York City”. Are you a lawyer or do you specialize in bankruptcy law in Los Angeles California?

It doesn’t always have to be region specific but I’m sure you get the point.

In the next article were going to talk about researching your keywords so that we can get an idea of: how many people are searching on the terms and how much competition exists for SEO and getting your site ranked for the specific terms.

Technorati Tags: keyword research, keywords, seo

If you haven’t already heard about SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization.  If you have a business or product to promote and your looking to find new customers, getting visitors to the site can be a big hurdle for most people.

SEO is the process by which a website is designed and modified to be able to show up in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. I know that might sound a little vague and it’s because SEO entails many, many different variables and things to consider.

The goal of this article is to talk about the most basic and important things to consider when first getting involved with SEO.

The main goal for working on SEO is to get your website to show up in the search engines for specific keywords or keyword phrases.  Let’s take “Guitar Lessons” for example.  If I have a site where I give information on learning to play the guitar, then a good keyword phrase for me to target would be “Beginner Guitar Lessons”.  The ideal situation for obtaining a new customer would be something like this: someone wants to learn to play the guitar so they go to google and type in “beginner guitar lessons”. My website shows up as one of the top spots on the page. The person sees my website, reads the description and clicks on the link to check it out. They read the sales page and buy my product.

Having my website show up as one of the top spots in google when someone typed in “beginner guitar lessons” was a result of good SEO implementation.

Now that you understand the basic idea of SEO, lets talk about the first steps you need to take for your own website and customer base.

When forming a plan of attack for SEO, the first thing that you need to find out are what keywords you want to target and optimize your site for.  Keywords are what rule the world of Internet Marketing because they are what connect you to your prospects.  Whether you are paying for advertising or using SEO to obtain free traffic via having your site show up in search results, knowing which keywords to advertise on and build your site around is the first step to creating a website that is going to be marketable and profitable.

So the next question your probably going to ask is “how do I know what keywords to target”?

Technorati Tags: keyword research, search engine optimization, seo

When a person gets interested in creating a product to sell, usually the first thing that they do is to take a look at something there good at or love to do and create a product or service revolving around that activity. While this will ensure that you pick a product that will keep you engaged in it’s development, naturally you have a passion for it and know a lot about it, It doesn’t always mean that it’s a good idea to move forward with spending time and money to put it all together.

Lets take the fine art of basket weaving for example. Now to many people basket weaving might seem to be just a bit boring and un-interesting. I’m quite sure though, that there are people out there that are in complete bliss when they are weaving together there next masterpiece of a basket. God bless em, you know who you are!

So Joe (our in-house basket weaving guru) makes his living as a basket weaver but wants to create some extra cash flow to make things a little easier finacially for himself and his family. What should I do? Joe asks himself. Of course! I’ll teach other people how to weave baskets.

Joe is now charged up with creative energy and entreprenuerial vigor. All I need to do is teach people how to do what I do and I’ll be raking in the dough. Joe now spends every extra hour of his day creating videos, drawings and educational material that he will use to teach other people how to master this most awesome of arts. After all, basket weaving has been Joe’s biggest passion in life so doesn’t everyone else want to do what he can do?

After month’s of hard work and spending a lot of money on producing videos and educational materials, his product is now done and ready to sell. Since Joe is not that knowledgable on marketing, he hires a marketing firm to get his product in front of as many people as possible on the Internet.

After spending thousands more to market his product and get the word out, results are looking grim and disapointing. Only a few sales were made and not much interaction from potential customers. Feeling defeated, Joe now scraps his idea of making extra money online and goes back to his regular grind.

This same scenario happens every single day online to hundreds if not thousands of people. The problem is that Joe never researched his marketplace to see if there actually was a demand for creating a product that teaches basket weaving.

All too often, we get caught up in our own ideals and interests, thinking that everyone else on planet earth should and wants to know how to do what we can do. While in many cases this can be true and profitable, many times it is not. The most crucial and important thing to do BEFORE you start spending time and money on an idea, YOU MUST research your marketplace to determing if there is a demand for what you have to offer. If you find that there is not, then either tweak your product to fit a need that people are willing to pay for or scrap the idea all together.

I have been there and done that and I can tell you first hand that it is extremely discouraging to put all your time and energy into an idea and then not see any financialy rewarding results come of it.

Moral of the story: DO YOUR RESEARCH AND CREATE SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO SPEND MONEY ON!