The Magic Funnel Effect
Plenty has been written on the magic formula to gain financial success via the Internet. There has also been plenty of money made out of various schemes over the years telling you how to get rich quick online and there continues to be serious amounts of cash spent on finding ‘that one special process which, if followed, can deliver your personal freedom’.
Well schemes that suggest you can get rich quick by following a certain scheme are there for one reason and one reason only ! To make you part with your hard earned cash to make the person selling the scheme rich.
Now this is not to say that plenty of people have not made very large amounts of money indeed from selling products and promoting their business on the Internet.
Some still do but you have never heard of most of them because they just quietly go about their business making money from what they have always done and refining their systems and strategies to make sure they continue to deliver as the Internet landscape changes.
It is also true to say that it is far more difficult to make money via the Internet than it was 3, 4, 5 years and more ago. The rules have been tightened and many of the simple tactics that worked in those days will quickly get you a Google slap today.
Bring traffic to your site and convert it to $$$
So is there any chance of getting a lead on the competition and turning the Internet into a new or improved source of revenue for your business ?
Fortunately the answer to that questions is a resounding ‘yes’, however, you must go about it in a much more systematic manner.
There are a few basic steps that, when taken in order, give your business the best chance of making it online. And, the best thing is, so few people even take the first of these steps so just by applying what you will learn in this article you will already be quite a ways ahead of your competition.
Market Research – Keyword Research
What do we mean when we mention the term ‘market research’ in relation to the Internet ?
Well it is similar to what you would do when setting up a business with a physical location.
Before we decide on a physical location we want to analyse the area around our business to ensure that the people thereabouts have some interest in our product.
We also need to make sure that there are sufficient people living in the vicinity of our business to get sufficient paying customers through the door to gain sufficient sales to pay our bills and make a profit.
We also want to make sure that there are few if any capable competitors in the area that will take business away from us or, at worst, make us share too much of the pie.
We also want to make sure that our shop front is located in a prominent position so we gain sales from passing trade.
Keyword Research is the way we do this for our online business.
So what is a keyword ?
A keyword is a phrase that your potential client enters into a search engine (Google, Bing or others) to find what they are looking for.
If I am looking for an electric power drill in my local area I might enter the term ‘electric drill’. In this case the term ‘electric drill’ is a keyword.
A keyword can be one word or a whole series of words. Keywords of three words or more are often called ‘long tail keywords’.
How do we use keywords to get traffic to our website ?
If my website ranks in first position in my region for the term ‘electric drill’ then studies suggest that at least 42% of the people searching for the term ‘electric drill’ will click on the link to my website in Google.
If my website is any good at all in closing business then there is no doubt I will make quite a few sales from those 42% of people coming to my website.
The fact is though that competition to get first place for the keyword ‘electric drill’ in my region is going to be very fierce indeed and as a small business there is very little likelihood that I will get that position.
So I need to box a bit smarter and do some keyword research.
So what is keyword research and how can it help me ?
Keyword research is the process of finding keywords that possess the following qualities:-
- best describe our product or service
- would likely be entered into Google by potential customers looking for products and / or services such as those we provide
- have a good quantity of people keying them into Google each day on average (the number for ‘good’ depends upon our business)
- don’t have too many big and capable competitors competing for the keyword
If we can find up to 10 keywords for our business that meet the above criteria and we optimize our website for them ( see our article on Search Engine Optimization ) then we will likely get quite a bit more traffic to our website.
So how do we do keyword research ?
There are a number of free and commercial tools available to help us with our keyword research.
Google itself has a free keyword research too called, surprisingly enough, the Google Keyword Tool.
Commercial tools are also provided by Market Samurai (the one we use here at OVMwebbuilder) and a number of other companies.
Additionally, some companies, including OVMwebbuilder, offer keyword research as a service as part of the web solution development process and as a Search Engine Optimization ( SEO ) service for clients who already have a website.
That is the end of our first article on the Magic Funnel Effect, in the next one we will be exploring Search Engine Optimisation.
