But there are so many ways of expressing the same problem. “Cat food” could also be “cat treats”, “food for kitty”, “organic cat food”. Someone who needs to feed a cat could use any of those terms in their search, or hundreds of others–and search engines record every one of them. That means there’s a mountain of data about what people are searching for–and it’s all waiting to be analyzed. That’s why initial keyword research is a crucial first step if you’re just starting an online business.

Low-cost research tools, like Keyword Discovery,Wordtracker, and BeBiz, make sense of all the data the search engines provide. With that knowledge, you can uncover untapped niche markets by finding problems a lot of people are seeking answers to–and not getting many results.

If you find a hungry market first, and develop a product to serve that market, you’ve already won half the battle.

Keyword research in a nutshell

1. Use one word to describe a passion or interest, e.g., dog.
2. Combine your interest word with “how” to generate problem statements in your keyword research tool, e.g., “how dog”. We use Google’s free AdWords Keyword Tool for this brainstorming process.
3. Record the “action words” that come up, e.g., “how wash dog”, “how housetrain dog”. These are terms that people are using to search the internet to solve a problem they have.
4. From that list, choose some problems that you have the interest, knowledge, or skill to solve, e.g., “train dog”.
5. Find as many ways as possible to express your interest word and your action word, e.g., training, educate, teach, show, obedience, commands, stop. To find similar terms quickly and easily, try entering each term into Thesaurus.com or the new Google Sets.
6. Enter your interest-plus-action phrases into your paid keyword tool–you’ll get a long list of real searches that people are doing in the area you’re focusing on, e.g., “stop Pomeranian yapping”, “teach dog cute tricks”, “paper train puppy”.
7. Organize the top keywords into groups according to the action being performed, e.g., barking, basic obedience, tricks, housetraining, professional dog training, puppy training, etc.–now you have some pretty specific problems you can investigate.
8. Look for the largest clusters and add up the number of actual searches–a large cluster with lots of searches is worth exploring further because it indicates that a large number of people are trying to solve the same problem.

You might not find a serious money-making niche the first few times you go through the process, but keep going. You’ll find one eventually, and you’ll get faster and better at it the more you do it.
Once your business is established, you’ll continue to use keyword research. You’ll look for the keywords that will attract the people who are most likely to buy your products, and you’ll use those keywords throughout your web pages.

You’ll use those same keywords in your advertising, and every time you reach out to new audiences via social networks or article distribution. You’ll build special landing pages based on keywords to attract targeted traffic to your opt-in offer or products.

When you’ve mastered the keyword research process, you’ve unlocked the door to online success.

This article is adapted from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31124530/

Allen Moon is the Marketing Director of theInternet Marketing Center, which creates information products, software, and training services that have helped thousands of people establish and grow their own profitable online businesses. He has just released the completely updated 2009 edition of the comprehensiveInsider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internetcourse.

]]> http://www.successfulltime.com/long-tail-keywords/from-keyword-to-business-idea-in-8-steps-learn-the-language-of-peoples-problems-and-youll-discover-untapped-markets/feed 0 http://www.successfulltime.com/long-tail-keywords/exploiting-long-tail-keywords-to-drive-massive-traffic http://www.successfulltime.com/long-tail-keywords/exploiting-long-tail-keywords-to-drive-massive-traffic#comments Fri, 26 Dec 2008 15:17:03 +0000 success http://www.successfulltime.com/?p=144 Hiya people! Guess you might have heard about long tail keywords and I hope from this article you get to understand how using PLR content can actually help you to exploit long tail keywords of individual niches in a way that will maximize traffic without spamming the search engines.

How many sites do you own, where the traffic generated from long tail keywords far exceeds that of the main keyword? I know personally about 60% of this site Success Full Time gain most of their traffic through their long tails as opposed to my main keyword like “Make Money Online” or “Affiliate Marketing”. You can check my ranking on long tail keywords through this post: My Blog Posts Google Organic Search Ranking – Exposed!

So What Are Long Tail Keywords?

Long tail keywords are basically keywords that contain the main keyword (name of the niche) plus other words. For example if the main keyword was “make money” an example of a long tail would be “make money doing nothing”. Incidentally, I rank #5 on Page 1 of Google search for “make money doing nothing”… for almost 1 year since the post has been written. COOL!

So What’s So Great About Long Tail Keywords?

Good question and the answer has to do with their level of competitiveness. Most long tail keywords are linked with low competition in the search engines. Well you may think “so what, hardly anyone searches for ‘make money doing nothing’”. No… just checking with Google’s Adwords: Keyword Tool, the keyword phrase “make money doing nothing” has approximately 1,300 searches for broad match type (without the quotes) for the month of November 2008. That’s about 43 searches per day (1,300 divide 30) which is not too bad for a long tail keyword.

Therefore, if you had 50 pages in your blog or website that all targeted different long tail keywords, won’t that make a lot of traffic? Since the average amount of visitors that the keyword phrase for example, “make money doing nothing” brings in a month is 1300, multiply that by 50 and you’ve got 65,000 unique visitors each and every month to your blog or website. Of course, I’m just using “make money doing nothing” which has approximately 1,300 searches. But, say we reduce that number of searches to even 100 searches per month, 50 different long tail keywords, would be bringing you 5,000 unique visitors per month to your blog or website… all through Google organic search engine.

Getting Excited Now?

Now tell me this, how hard do you think it would be to rank for those keywords? Easy! That’s right, most long tail keywords are incredibly easy to rank for in the search engines. In fact on many occasions all that’s required would be to upload a page that has content targeted towards a long tail and as soon as it’s gets indexed, you may find it ranking on the first page immediately.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you should forget about targeting your main keyword and just focus on the long tails. By all means you should still have a page – usually your home page – that targets the main keyword for your niche, but you have to realize that almost all of the time it’s going to require a lot of SEO before you see any real traffic coming from that particular keyword.

So, why not at the same time, build pages that will gain traffic faster through exploiting long tail keywords to different pages that act as window pages into the main heart of your website?

So what do I do if I don’t have time to write 50 pages worth of content?

PLR Content to the Rescue

Right now PLR content is easily the best way of exploiting the long tails of any particular niche. Why? Well depending on the type of PLR content you have at your disposal, most PLR articles are written based around specific long tail keywords. That means you will be able to build pages that have content specifically optimized for individual long tail keywords, which the search engines will absolutely love!

If you don’t want to spend a lot of time writing article after article on topics like “make money doing nothing” and you can’t afford to pay someone to write these articles for you, PLR content is the solution you are looking for.

One of the best PLR content on the web is PLR Pro which has opened recently as Project Green Button. This product is not too expensive looking at the massive amount of stuff that you will be getting… The founders Marc Lindsay & Daniel Turner has created a product which is all about Site Automation. Content Automation. Traffic Automation… At The Push Of A Button.

I’m not going to spoil their product fantastico… You really owe it to yourself to check out this product out. Check out PLR Pro… I’ll be most happy if you buy the product through my affiliate link here: PLR Pro

P/S: I have no doubts that PLR Pro – Project Green Button is a quality product. But… you have to hurry… because, it had been almost 1 month since PLR Pro has been re-opened (sorry I didn’t promote this earlier). In no time until the last few spots have been filled, PLR Pro will close once again. The last time it closed was for 6 long months, and the attrition rate for this product per month is amazingly low at 3.98% (industry standard is 5-10%). So, get your copy of PLR Pro here and today!!

Cheers and Wishing All a Prosperous and Fabulous Happy New Year! Remember 2009 will be your best year yet! Wishing You All Wealth And Abundance in 2009! God bless!