Still #2 at MSN & Internet Marketing Tutorial

Good morning all. I'm experimenting with the setup of my posts, so please bear with me as I try to figure out the best structure. There is a lot here, so make sure you take time to read through it.

Getting Started

I want to talk a little bit about getting started in this big world of Internet Marketing -- with your own website or blog. If you weren't interested in that, you probably wouldn't be visiting this site.

Most successful sites are those that start with clear objectives in mind. Written is best. Get it down on paper!

Are you trying to make money or are you feeding a hobby?
How do you plan to get visitors to your site? Are you planning on paying for advertising, or are you going to try to get your site ranked by search engines organically?
Who is your target audience?
Do they have money to spend?
Are you selling a product, service or advertising (or any combination of the three)?

You must commit to focusing your site on a niche -- a small narrow band of interests.

My site is about Kitten Pictures -- pretty narrow, right?
It's not about 'Pictures';
It's not about 'Animal Pictures';
It's not about 'Cat Pictures';
It's about 'Kitten Pictures'.

Pictures -> Animal Pictures -> Cat Pictures -> Kitten Pictures

Do you see the progression from very broad to narrow?

So, how do we find this niche? Great question.

Let's start with your hobbies and skills.

What do you like?
What are you good at?
Even more important, what would other people say that you are good at?

** Be careful not to downplay the value of your skills, believe me, there is an audience of people who can benefit from what you know.

Let's say you have a love for trains. You have loved anything about trains since you were a kid.

Let's see if we can find a niche that we can exploit.

For this next exercise, I'm going to use a free tool called "Good Keywords" http://goodkeywords.com/. Free is good, right?

Now, let's open Good Keywords and do a search on the word 'trains'. I'm going to use the Overture US as my source for data. Make sure you download this tool and try it along with me -- this is great practice.





























Notice that the word 'train' garners approximately 147K clicks per month in overture. That's a lot of traffic. However, the word 'trains' is much too broad of a niche, especially when you are starting out. We need to find something a little smaller and more targeted.

Notice that 'Thomas the Train' is also very popular with 54K searches per month. Lionel trains gets about 11K searches per month. That's probably a little more like it.

Just because a keyword or keyword is phrase is popular and gets a lot of traffic, that's only one part of the equation. We need to know how much competition there is for that keyword or keyword phrase.

My next posting will show you how I figure out how to assess the competition for a keyword/keyword phrase.


Assignment
Make an inventory of your skills and hobbies.
Download Good Keywords and get familiar with the demand for the keywords which represent your skills/interests.


A summary of yesterday's activity:

For my site http://kitten-pictures.com/, I posted on the front page that I wanted to do link exchanges. I also looked around a bit for some link exchange software that was free to use. I reviewed some, but haven't come to a decision. I like the link metro (http://www.linkmetro.com/) directory, but their advanced membership which maintains a lot of the mundane link tasks is more than I want to pay per month -- at this time anyway.

I spent most of yesterday pursuing link exchanges on link metro (http://www.linkmetro.com/). I really like this directory because it's not hard to sell -- these people are already predisposed to the idea of link exchanges and so that's one less hurdle to have to jump. There are other link exchanges out there that I noticed when looking on Google, but I've not had time to pursue yet.

I posted a really great picture on the http://kitten-pictures.com/ site -- you all should check it out (small plug :>) ).

I received notice from more article submission sites that my article "An Introduction To Pet Photography" was accepted. I got a couple declines, but mainly due to the content matching the theme of the submission site. The big score is getting into http://ezinearticles.com/ -- they are fairly selective compared to most.


Today's activity is going to be spent doing:

Advertising this blog on several of the Google groups with theme of 'work from home', or 'internet marketing' -- done already!

Post on my favorite Cat Health Google group -- done already!

Writing this post -- almost done :>)

Continue to work on my link exchanges on Link Metro (http://www.linkmetro.com/).

Set up my Article page on http://kitten-pictures.com/ -- ran out of time yesterday.


Make it a great day!