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All too often I hear people telling me they suffer from information overload, or that they know exactly how to set up and run an internet business but still can’t get off the starting block…

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Fact is, you can get all the information you need pretty quickly.  And once you’ve got it, no one ever tells you, “you’ve learned enough now -  you can make a start”.

Did you know that attending a single well-chosen Internet seminar can give you all the information you need. Just don’t leave it thinking you’re a beginner, and that you have to learn even more before you start. Its not true. You’re no longer a beginner. Its time to use your knowledge to strengthen your confidence in making a start.  Trial and error helps.

Its your actions which earn money, not your learning.

Of the advice I give to my clients in Action Time sessions, much of it they already know. So the difference between the people who actually succeed with Internet Marketing and those who don’t isn’t what they know, its what they do.

And that is the point of these action sessions: to break it down into clear, easy-to-follow, action steps. Big as the Internet already is (1.6 Billion users with 500 million buyers, at the last count, and still growing exponentially) there are gaping opportunities for entrepreneurs to grab a huge slice of profitable niches as long as they perform good keyword research.

There are several reasons why good keyword research is so important, but the truth is, if you don’t do it, you can’t expect to succeed. It would be like building your house on sand: You know you can do it, but it will fall over.

And yet the most amazing thing is most people (99%) don’t actually take the time to do it! There in itself is the opportunity: Do keyword research well and you can find yourself ranking among the most established businesses in your niche very quickly.

Keyword research: vital to the growth of your business

Keyword research isn’t just picking four or five phrases which you imagine your customers might type into a search engine so you can use those words in articles on your site. Well, that is keyword research of a form, but its very basic. Its not going to help much. So here are some pointers, some ways in which I do keyword research, which I have found to make a real difference.

1. Brainstorm your target market thoroughly

Brainstorming for keywords means more than just picking a few words and phrases off the top of your head. It means thinking hard about your customers, their age, their habits, what they wear, what they earn, and creating a complete profile of them, because then you’ve got to get inside their brain. When you’re in the brain of your precisely-defined target customer, you can imagine exactly what keywords they would use. For example – might they miss-spell or use foreign spelling? – might they abbreviate? – might they include a location, a city or state, in their search phrase?  Or perhaps a date, or year…?

Consider these things and more when drawing up your first list of keywords, and make it a good, healthy and long list of twenty or thirty – more if you can, which you consider to be good base keywords for your niche. Don’t think about long and short tale at this stage. (Long tale keywords are the ones which are more specific. They get less searches, but they are prone to convert better because they’re more precise).

2. Expand your keyword list using Google’s free keyword tool

Once you’ve got your base list, open the free keyword tool at google, and enter the keywords to get Google’s list of related keywords. Enter them one by one and do a search with each one. Pick through this list, adding keywords you don’t already have – and are relevant – to your existing list. In a separate list,  and with the base keyword as the header, make a list of all the keywords in the Additional keywords to be considered column. This is found underneath the list of Related Keywords. The reason why I recommend google’s free keyword tool and not wordtracker, for example, is because Google controls the indexing of web pages, Wordtracker doesn’t. So when Google help us with keyword lists, either related, or to be considered, its actually telling us which phrases it is most likely to index us well for. Wordtracker is a great tool too, but overall, I have had more success with Google’s free keyword tool and Fabian Lim’s excellent Keyword Research PRO software (which uses Google and Wordtracker).

3. Store your keywords somewhere safe and somewhere you can share them

You will want to have quick and easy access to your keyword list, and so will  anyone you employ to create content for you. I use a spreadsheet in Google Docs to store my keywords, that way I can access them, and add to them, wherever I am, and share them directly my article writers and video creators easily so they can be working when I’m not.

4. Set up your content stream

Now that you have the keywords which you know will draw traffic, you can use them in several ways. They will be useful for pay-per-click contextual advertising but my interest, for now, is to get organic search traffic without having to pay for it.

When I do this, I find I can get between 3 and 8 listings in the organic Google search for terms which Pay-per-click advertisers have bid a dollar or more for.

The trick is this: Get a consistent stream of good content on your site, with a main keyword in the title of the article and between 3% and 7% keyword density of other related keywords - which you got from the Google Keyword tool, plus a splash of the Additional keywords to be considered, to help Google’s LSI (Latent Semantic Index). Then you will find that you can begin pulling traffic overnight to a wordpress blog with the All In One SEO plugin installed.

In my next installment, I’m going to show you how you can start getting that constant flow of content without having to create it yourself. Once you get it right, it can all be put on autopilot. In the meantime, be sure to get Sparky, Alexa.com’s browser toolbar. It gives you the alexa rank for every site you visit, and you’re going to want to watch the rank of your own site. As a rule of thumb, you should aim to get it below 100,000 first of all (i.e. be within the top 100,000 most visited sites on the Internet). Once you start doing this basic SEO stuff right, with good keyword research, you’ll be surprised how quickly the Alexa rank will move.

TIP: Keywords on your site are only any good if your site is being seen and indexed regularly by the search engines. It can take a while for a new domain to be indexed by google, so here’s a quick way to speed it up:

Download the Google Toolbar and install it in your web-browser. Then, enter your domain in the toolbar search box. If your site isn’t returned then its not indexed by Google yet. However, the action of entering “yourdomain.com” in the search box, or “yourdomain.info”, for whatever yourdomain is, places it in Google’s index so it will reach your site when it next sends the spiders round.

I hope you’ve found this helpful. Let me know with a comment below, and listen out for the next part in the series, when I show you how to put your entire content and high-volume organic traffic stream on autopilot.

Until then, I recommend having a look at Fabian Lim’s new Keyword Reasearch Pro Tool… I’ve been using this recently, and I’m impressed…

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Everyone now has an MVS (My Viral Spiral) site and a Products folder for placing their product sales pages. Those two things on their own are enough for anyone to run a successful online business. All they need to do is generate their first flow of traffic.

Today’s participants are also adding a blog to the mix of their business activities. This will become an invaluable tool both for building customer relationships and for generating hordes of visitors to to their squeeze pages.

As I write this, they are writing their first post. Very soon they will be catching the eye of the search engines, and with a signup form in the sidebar of their blog, they will be filtering off a free flow of traffic to their squeeze pages and sales pages.

Here are the names of today’s participants, with links to their new blogs.

Harrie & Karolien Sengers
Gavin Roberts
Doreen Hall
Ankya Klay
George Artz
Roy & Lillian Simpson
Atula Jayasinghe

If you were there, please let me know how you’re getting on…

Thats right: So many valuable tips aren’t passed on, because too many of us presume others already know about them…

Well – if you know about this, great – glad you’re enjoying it too, but if not, let me introduce you to a free tool which I use uncountable times during my working day.

Its called Sparky…

This is an attachment to my browser window. It will work with IE or Firefox, whichever is your preference.

When you go to a website, there are a number of things which might strike you about it straight away: Appealing graphics, a hard-hitting headline, good/bad copy, industry logos, testimonials etc… but none of them give you a clue about how frequently the site is visited.

And don’t you think that’s important?

Put it this way: when you’re thinking of using a service, or buying a product, it helps to know how many others have used it too. We gain assurance in our purchase by knowing this. Or we realise we’re taking a risk. Either way, its worth knowing.

This is as important online as it is off. Social proof is a great way of converting sales, and its never better than when it is provided independently.

For example… if you find a site that is offering something, and claiming thousands of people have had success with it, then you should expect it to be quite a popular site, no?

So what if you could know, straight away, whether they were telling the truth or not?

Well, one of the dangers when we start out working online, is that there are many sites like that. And the only credible way of knowing how well it is visited, is by checking its Alexa rank.

The google rank helps too. That is a measure of how many other sites link to it (and what their rank is too), but that’s for another post.

Alexa is a web information company. It continuously researches every site it comes across on the Internet and monitors how frequently it is visited. Not only that, but it also gathers information about other related sites which carry a similar topic, so you can visit them too.

The Alexa toolbar, as it was, or Sparky, as they call it now, is a very cool tool for uncovering more about the webpage you’re looking at.

With it, you can not only tell how popular the site is, but also how its traffic has grown, or declined, in previous months.

The alexa rank is just that, a rank of popularity. The most visited site on the Internet (Google) has an alexa rank of 1. As I write, Facebook has a rank of 6. This means it is the 7th most visited site on The Internet. This is how it is displayed in the task bar of my browser window.

As a rule of thumb, if you can get your blog, or a site of yours, to show an alexa rank of less than 100,000 – you’re doing well: Its a good thing to aim for.

The page you’re looking at, my blog, used to have an alexa rank of around 60,000 – when I was updating it daily. Now that I do it less frequently, the rank has dropped to 280,000 or so.

Would it help you to know how well you’re doing in the traffic rankings – at a glance?

If you think so, or even if you would like to know more about any site you visit, and what other similar sites are, I strongly recommend you get this cool free tool.

The simple fact is this: If you’re marketing online, its helpful to know how your site is ranked against your competitors’. Using this tool, you can do that easily: visit both sites, and note the alexa rank of both. The one with the lower number, is visited more frequently than the other.

You can download and install Sparky on your web-browser at this link:

Hope you found this helpful. Either way, please let me know.

Have you got other tools you find useful in your day-to-day work… let me know with a comment below -

Oh, and by the way – if you don’t want me to moderate your commment, please make sure it doesn’t contain an affiliate link.

Or is it?

In fact, Internet Marketing is different. Unlike most professions, Internet Marketing requires input from a complete variety of disciplines and skills, and our performance in the field will be hindered if we don’t either supply it ouselves, or outsource it.

When you try and sell something online, its actually quite similar to selling something offline. You need a shop window, a point of entry, a welcoming face, a shop interior which satisfies curiosity, and all the follow-up service which visitors expect.

This sounds straight forward. Its a process we take for granted every day of our lives when we go shopping in the high street. But to pull it off successfully on the Internet requires a careful application of knowledge and skill. Some can do it well, and get spectacular results very quickly. Others can’t and don’t.

So what is it that some have, and others don’t?

I have been researching this recently to help with my series of Freedom Classes.

In these classes I am teaching people how to market successfully online. I am offloading much of the knowledge I have gathered, about what works and what doesn’t, and – hopefully – inspiring my participants to discover for themselves what the best way is for them.

A difference about The Freedom Class is that I am conducting it by Action Learning. This means that participants not only learn directly from me, like in a classroom, but also learn from each other’s experience. It is a method of learning particularly suited to Internet Marketing because we’re all doing it all the time, and there is no right or wrong way, only ways which work and ways which don’t.

One of the characteristics of Action Learning, which is also a characteristic of successful Internet Marketing, is working in groups. It is no secret that I owe much of my own success to the Mastermind group, formed in September 2006, which brought together Bob Jenkins, Glen Hopkins, Matthew Glanfield, Dan Kelly, Scott Tousignant, Martin Salter and myself.

In the time since then, we have devoted an hour each week to a conference call, on which we can air what we are doing, express any difficulties we’re having, ask for help, and offer advice. We do this through a freely available conference line, and even though between seven of us, we are in 4 different time zones and 3 different countries, we still do it every week.

No matter how good we are at some things, we can never be good at everything. And I honestly believe that anyone seeking success with Internet Marketing who doesn’t form a mastermind group such as this, is holding themself back.
Recently I undertook an exercise to identify 5 characteristics which I believe are important to Internet Marketers. With these, I created a questionnaire for my Freedom Class attendees aimed at providing a visual display of which characteristics they possessed, and in what quantity.

The aim of the exercise is to help them find other group members for creating an effective team.

Much of the work in The Freedom Class will be conducted in groups and it is important, I believe, that each of the characteristics is represented in each group.

Here is a list of the characteristics I identified:

1. Writer
2. Artist
3. Co-ordinator
4. Marketer
5. Technician

My theory is that a team conducting Internet Marketing activity, in this case to provide each member with their own Internet Marketing business, should possess each of these characteristics… and – for best results – in equal measure.

We will discover if I am right from the experience of my first set of students on The Freedom Class this weekend… you can be sure I’ll keep you posted.