Maverick Global Online

One of the toughest challenges facing internet marketers is keyword selection and expansion.  Marketers need to be adept at selecting keywords that will not only drive traffic, but more importantly get that traffic to convert to sales in a cost-effective manner.  With so much competition, it is increasingly difficult to identify unique, high quality keywords to use for Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising in Googles Adwords.  In this article we will discuss some common mistakes internet marketers make in terms of keyword researching.

Five Keyword Research Mistakes

1. One great tool is from Google itself – the “Google Keyword Suggester Tool”.  This tool is made purposely for Adwords and upon finding the right specific keyword, some make the mistake of leaving the suggester on ‘broad’.  The better way to see the search volume for a phrase would be to change ‘broad’ to ‘exact’.  To many marketers make this mistake and rank for a keyword only to find out later that it is almost worth nothing.
2. Another common mistake is that people simply don’t use multiple research tools when trying to identify keywords.  Although Google’s tool is good, no tool is 100% accurate.  It is best to combine the results with other keyword tools like Wordtracker.com to guarantee you are selecting a keyword that is actually worth trying to rank for.
3. When looking at how competitive a keyword is, you should put the keyword in quotes, like this. (”keyword you want to rank for”) Then, you should put the keyword in Google’s search engine with the “allintitle:” command, to give you an idea of how much competition you have to dealt with beforehand.
4. Remember tools themselves cannot determine everything accurately – they are not human.  Try also just using some common sense as well.  Put yourself in the seat of the person making the inquiry – what would that person most likely type in?  What would you type in?
5. Lastly and hopefully a very obvious mistake is that competing for a one word highly competitive keyword is no good.  Unless you are some multi-million dollar company, you won’t see any results for a high tier keyword like “money” anytime soon.  Long tail keywords are the way to go and much easier to rank for.  Some long tail keywords can even out shine single keywords in terms of search volume.

Project: Niche Business Directory

Experience Level: Mid

Concept:  Create an on-line niche directory and sell advertising/listing upgrades to businesses, ethnic groups and religious groups

Note: this concept will work best with offline advertisers in a small city or suburb (you need to provide that one to one physical presence to close the deal)

The internet is growing every day and more and more business are looking to create a presence online.  Nobody wants to “miss the boat” and everybody knows that you must be online to capture all possible sales.  Creating a niche directory can help you reap the rewards of reaching these interested business owners.  A niche directory or yellow pages can be the connecting point for local, ethnic and religious advertisers in your community.  We will take a look at three types:  local businesses, local ethnic groups and local religious groups.

Local Businesses:

Google and Yahoo are already really pushing the Local Search Results on SERPs (search engine results page).  Any webmaster trying to optimize their web page will have to admit it is a growing challenge to maintain top positions with Google’s top ten local search results (with map) usually grabbing the top position.  Thus, local search is BIG business.  Starting a local niche directory and getting it to rank high for local keywords is a great idea in this current economy.  For example, lets say you live in or near Las Vegas.  You could start a Las Vegas Yellow Pages Directory.  By being familiar with the local city, you can make personal contact with business owners and local city officials to promote your directory to.  Google and Yahoo may have billions of dollars, but they can’t make the relationships like you can locally.  You can grow your directory business by sponsoring local events, radio station promotions, movie theater ads, fliers and obviously by direct contact to local businesses.

Ethnic Groups:

Ethnic directories are a great way to pull together the businesses and advertisers for a particular community.  For example, an African American directory can help local minority owned businesses grow and prosper.  This can prove to be a great move due to the acceptance and promotion by the community and the directory will grow quickly.  By partnering with the community you can run minority ads and announcements.  Local events, fairs, charity fund drives, vacation bible school and school plays can all be showcased driving local visitors to your site.  Think about some of your minority groups: women’s, Asian, Jewish, Hispanic or whatever local group has a need.

Religious Groups:

Lastly, starting a niche directory for a religious group in your area can be a great idea too.  You can promote it first in the church that you attend.  A Christian directory can support the local business in your church, then this can expand to other Christian churches in your area.

Building Blocks:

1. Hard data.  You will need a list of business to start working from to initially fill your directory.  You can manually add data from a local phone directory or use a scraper to pull the initial data off a common large directory like YellowPages.com.

1. Software.  You can make your own or buy a program specifically designed to create a directory database.

1. Niche.  Look around you – who needs representation or promotion?  Daycares, restaurants, auto dealers, Chinese community….    Go very local.

After you have built the initial site and database, fill it with content.  Give away free advertising to some of the big dogs – then start campaigning your services to the businesses or advertisers listed in your database – the others will follow.

Many people every day endeavor to make a start or a re-start in internet marketing and website design. With high expectations they follow the dream of “How to make $897 a day while they sleep”. Several weeks, months, or even years down the road they realize that despite their best efforts they are no richer and probably not much wiser. Here is a look at 10 surefire ways to waste your internet marketing efforts:

1. Apply as an affiliate for every product and service that you think looks easy. Set up a blog with your affiliate links, lay around and wait for the traffic and conversions to come rolling in.

2. Read every e-mail and buy every new money maker product that is sent to your inbox. Don’t be concerned that you have only completed the first step of the last sure-fire miracle program – this one has got to be an even bigger money maker!

3. Set up a beautiful landing page for your affiliate product, and then cover it with Google adsense ads that people can click on while forgetting about your product.

4. Comment on 40 to 50 blog sites every day with “Hey, that was great, have a look at my site blahblahblah.com”

5. Do similar things on 40 to 50 website forums a day, which have nothing to do with your affiliate product you are promoting. Make sure not to add any useful comments to any threads, but do be sure to always make a new thread with the enticing title “Check out my great product!”

6. Write one measly article every six or seven months. Submit it to Buzzle articles and wait for the visitors to come flooding to your site. Oh yes, make sure to use your targeted keyword at least once in every other sentence. If you are very clever you can change where you put the sentences and submit the same article to around 25 other article sites.

7. Open ad campaigns on both Google and Yahoo. Start with a daily budget of $600 and around 85 keywords that you think have anything to do with what you are trying to promote. Write one sure-fire ad that tells people to buy it from your website because you are the best and they can’t do without it. Again, lay around and wait for the big bucks to start rolling in.

8. Buy a “targeted” list of 3,000 strangers and send out e-mails once a day to let them know that you understand their needs and can personally help them enlarge their bank account. Lay around, relax, and wait for the money to fill your account.

9. Make sure to visit yahoo answers 4 times a day. Questions such as “How can I tell if I am a genius?”, “Does my cat have fleas?” or “How do I remove red eye from a picture in Photoshop?” can all be answered with “Click here to find out how to make money”. Sit back and wait to be banned.

10. Admit that all internet marketing is a scam. Give up and get a real job.

When using a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service, you need to realize that it’s very important to have the right information to use these tools properly in optimizing your website. There are many potential mistakes that are being made with SEO, so learning the most current techniques and up-to-date information to utilize these tools is the only way to increase your Search Engine Request Page (SERP) ranking to your website. Paying attention to the small nuances of optimization is very huge and will make a world of difference with ranking your webpage.

The Title is the text at the top of the browser window on the browser tab. This Title should be different for each page of the website and be related to the keywords on that webpage.  It is recommended that all the different pages can contain the company information, but make sure to incorporate a unique keyword in every page. An simple example of this technique is, for example of a website that is about “horses.” The page keywords to use would be horse history, horse studs, and horse mules.

Upon a search for “horses of America,” the search engine seeks the pages with the words of the search in the page title. The word “horse” will create a hit to the web page. If the page were titled “male horses,” it would most likely would not be included in the search results. That is what you most want to avoid by not using the same keyword in the titles.

A typical internet user knows that any underlined words have a link (or hyperlink) attached to them. They can see the link by rolling the mouse over the words. Make sure that all the underlined word links (or hyperlinks) are current and up to date. The underlined word is one of the SEO practices that help with the web searches so make sure the link is still valid. This will avoid frustration and confusion for the visitor that visits the site.

Making sure all of these aspects on the website are up-to-date and accurate will mean that the website is going to be enjoyable. It will increase web traffic also, as well as increase the money generated from the website.

There has been some online discussion; particularly with the huge amount of focus on Social Marketing strategies as to whether content really is still king on the internet. Forums, blogs and social sites are where individuals want to make conversation, not dig for content, right? So as internet marketers are we kidding ourselves to believe that content is still king?

We love to talk with our friends, and the internet has become as much a place for socializing as it is a place to find interesting information. People are no longer spending lots of time on the internet just to find out about stuff, they come to find and make friends and communicate with each other. Chat rooms and social sites are the prime examples of this.

Some people may even find it a somewhat intimidating that there are people on the net who can’t even make a trip to the mall without consulting with their facebook or twitter friends first! This is of course one reason social network sites has become so important to internet marketing. Content just gives us interesting stories and information to share.

Having something to talk about something interesting seems pretty important though. How many of you have ever had one of those talks with a friend, or colleague, where after a couple of hello’s and how are you’s there is nothing left to talk about, except perhaps today’s weather? Chat rooms and the break room are of course great places to spread a little gossip and many individuals never seem to run out of it. Where does that leave the website developers?

You can of course waste hours of your time texting on a social network, and letting all your friends on facebook know that you are going to the bathroom, but we all know that would be ridiculous, and it’s not going to do much for your business reputation either. Some content writers manage to fill their pages with celebrity gossip and this is one answer to the content/conversation issue. For most internet marketers though, this is not really a workable solution.

So should we all throw in the towel and forget about providing content? Most definitely not! Have a look at what people are interested in now and you will find it’s content, content, and more content. Internet marketers are also well aware of the fact that the search engines just love content. Even if no-one was actually looking the content, the search engines still crawl the net looking for it.

Good, fresh, interesting content. People read news stories and articles, read blogs and read website content. Much as people enjoy chatting with friends and socializing they also want information, news and interesting new knowledge. Content is most definitely still king. So as internet marketers, let’s give them something to talk about!

This is my first post to this blog.  I will be adding all the content / stories / techniques / tips-n-tricks that I find all across the net.  Yes there are sooooo many “make money” sites on the web.  My spin?  I hate not winning – so I will uncover any and all processes to monetize any website – from AdSense to SEO services, Pay-Per-Click to Cost-Per-Action, I will explore it all.