Are you just starting in the internet business world and just going to start your first website or blog?

You have already decided your niche, market and audience and now you need to research keywords for topics to include in your website?

Sounds familiar?

If the answer of the above question is YES, then you must be in the confusion about choosing keywords for starting your new web project.

Most Common Mistakes an IM Newbie Makes:

The most common mistakes which the beginners make while starting their very first project is choosing a highly competitive niche, whose main keywords are very hard to rank. Let’s move forward in the discussion of choosing niches and keywords and what to consider while doing research.

While choosing a niche you should keep the below points in mind

1. Are there good affiliate programs in the niche? the more the better
2. Average payout of the affiliate programs
3. Are there good number of paid results in Google Search ( there must be good number of AdWords advertiser, you can also check Yahoo and Bing Results also)
4. Use Google Trends to analyze about the trends of the main keywords of the niche, Is it stable (is it getting almost similar number of searches for whole year, or is it seasonal)

If you get positive result for all of the above points, it confirms the niche has potential for making good money.

Do not get afraid about the competitiveness of the niche at this point of time. We will discuss about that after a short while.

While doing niche research, the only aim in you mind should be about the profitability of the niche and not about competition, because if any niche is highly profitable, then it will surely have a lot of micro niches, where the competition will not be much higher and can be easily dominated.

For an example “Weight loss” is a very competitive niche and highly profitable too. Now as we know this niche is very profitable (using all the four points we discussed above), we will try to find out smaller niches in this broad niche. If we do a little research there are several smaller niches, like

Weight loss using exercises
Weight loss using yoga
Weight loss using green tea
Weight loss using hypnosis
Weight loss with walking
Weight loss with dieting

And lots more…..

Now find a smaller niche for you and start to delve deeper in it.

Use keyword tools to find more keywords related to your main keyword.

Now visit different forums (you can find them easily by using Google typing “your keyword” forums), Yahoo Answers, AnswerBag etc and try to find out different topics people are discussion.

Now do some more brain storming and try to find out some more relevant keywords.

Hope you got the point

A simple trick to gather more keywords for you niche:

Visit ArticlesBase, for those who are new in internet marketing, it is one of the best article directory which receives a lot of traffic and there are millions of publisher who submit and publish their content daily.

Now search for articles related to the main keyword you decided for your new website and open articles and see the author’s bio box where you will find links which will lead you to the author’s website for which they are doing promotion.

Try to find out which type of promotion they are doing on their website, affiliate marketing, Adsense or something else.

Now come back to the article and see the article tags section and you will find numerous keywords related to that article. Repeat this step for 10 to 15 articles and you will get a bunch of keywords to start with.

After gathering keywords, again use keyword tool to find more.

The key here is, if the person is promoting any affiliate product, they must have done a lot of keyword research in the niche and we can use it for our advantage.

For some persons this trick would seem wrong and unethical, but one point to remember is that we are not stealing anything and these article tags are publicly visible.

So now you got the way to find out some micro niches in highly competitive and profitable niches.

So how many keywords we need to start:

In my opinion you should start with around 50 keywords and further add 30 more in the period of every six months.

As the time will pass, you will have ample content on your website and with proper off page promotion you will gain authority status on the micro niche and completely dominate it.

So start finding your niche keywords today. If you have any question or comment, then please post it here.

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What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing as the name suggest is to sell a product of a vendor as an affiliate and receive a percentage of the profit as commission. In a simpler sense you as an affiliate, sell products of others (commonly known as vendor) and receive a commission on every sale. The percentage of the commission varies, depending on the type of goods or services the vendor is selling.

If you are selling any digital product like software, ebooks then the commission will be high ranging from 45% to 75%. The reason of such a generous commission is the digital natural of the product. The seller does not need to ship any product and the buyer can download it to their computer as soon as they make the purchase. As the product does not need any maintenance, it further reduces the overall cost for the seller and they can offer good commissions to their affiliates.

On the other hand in case of physical goods, the commissions are low ranging from 2% to 10%, because of the maintenance, insurance and shipping cost of the product raises the overall price

What is Pay Per Click advertisement?

Do not misunderstand PPC advertising as denoted here to, advertising in search engines.( As people commonly refer advertising in Google AdWords, Yahoo or MSN as PPC) Here we refer it to the advertisement you can put on your website, from any third party for which you are paid per click basis.

For an example we can take the case of Google Adsense, where they allow publishers to add a snippet of code on their website through which they show ads related to the content and theme of the website. The publisher is paid for the number of legitimate clicks on the ads.

In this form of advertising the publisher needs not to worry about the sales or any other specific conditions (like in case of affiliate and CPA marketing).

Which one is more profitable?

These both types of marketing approach is profitable and depends on number of factors like niche, your website traffic, your web content etc.

If you have a very desperate niche and getting a decent amount of traffic you can chose affiliate marketing, because in desperate niches where visitors are in need of solution of a specific problem, the conversion rate is always higher. So in this case affiliate marketing would be the best option.

If you have a general theme website with lot of content pages and traffic you can try various pay per click advertising from Google, Yahoo, Adbrite, BidVertiser etc. but this does not mean you can not do affiliate marketing here, you can try both at the same time.

Special Requirement for Affiliate Marketing:

There are some general and legal factors which you should always keep in mind in case of affiliate marketing which we will discuss in coming posts.

Liked this post? Please post your comments here and let us know.

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What is marketing and Role of Internet in Marketing!

According to wikipedia.com “Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to market, as in shopping, or going to a market to buy or sell goods or services.”

I am in a no way any research scholar in marketing neither I want to explain it in detail. In my opinion a process before the actual sales starts, that includes knowledge propagation, brand building, creating or funneling a user base. Creating an environment, in which actual sales takes place is called marketing.

These lines may seems confusing to a newbie, but you need not worry much about the theory portion, because it is very necessary that you know more about implementing this practically rather than theory, particularly in the arena of internet marketing.

In coming days we will discuss several aspects related with marketing over internet.

Marketing starts with a product or service available for sale. Be it physical products, digital products or information and counseling.

Reach to millions of people

Some years before United States of America, Canada, United Kingdom, Mexico and Australia and some other developed countries of North and South America and Europe were considered the exclusive avenues for internet marketing and ecommerce, because they had the privilege of high speed internet and other ecommerce infrastructure like online payment processing etc.

But as the electronics and communication is developing at a stormy pace. New markets like India, China, Malaysia, Philippines and other South East Asian countries and some countries in South America are emerging as new avenues for online business. Even internet users in China and India will exceed US in coming few years.

So in this age of global economy, every barrier is broken and internet presents a vast geographical market to the prospective provider or seller. This creates a competition for local providers as well and this profits the prospective buyer or user.

Below are some stats of internet users and internet penetration in relation to the population which will makes the situation a little clearer.

(All figures are of March 2009, unless specified otherwise)

Above statistics will make it clear, and the most exciting fact is this user base will almost become doubled in coming 4 to 5 years.

Now a days, the purchasing power of the average population has increased considerably, in turn available free time reduced

Now people have more money and less time, so they want some solution for their daily chores, from paying bills online to shopping they are trying new medium (of course internet to save their time and efforts)

So in a nutshell we can predict that internet will become the medium for almost 50 to 60 percent of all ecommerce transactions in the known world (I cannot predict for the unknown ones)

Role of Internet in Marketing Part 2 ( Coming Soon)

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