Your keyword choices are critical to your success in nearly any online home small business model. Whether you’re pursuing Pay-Per Click (PPC), blogging, Virtual Real Estate (VRE) and Adsense, or any number of Internet Marketing strategies, the keywords you choose can make or break your success.

Keywords are important for several reasons. First of all, there’s traffic. If you choose the wrong keywords to target, you’re probably not going to get nearly as much traffic as you’d like. Whether you’re using PPC or search engines to get your traffic, your keywords are going to affect your ranking and link performance.

Another reason why keywords are so vital is the fact that you need targeted traffic. Ten thousand visitors coming to your domain via the keyword “books” is probably going to be worthless compared to 500 visitors who come via the keyword phrase, “Harry Potter books,” if that’s what you’re selling.

Someone who is searching for “books” is probably just browsing. They may not even be interested in buying anything – they could be interested in selling books, book history, book publishers, and more.

But someone who is searching for “Harry Potter books” is probably ready to buy something right then and there. So it’s not enough to just get a lot of traffic – you need a lot of traffic that’s willing to take the action you want them to take.

Whether you’re looking to sell ebooks, promote affiliate products, get leads for a CPA offer, or just get sign-ups to your list, you want targeted visitors who are likely to be buyers now or in the future.

Once you’ve chosen a niche you’d like to pursue, you need to research the keywords you’ll use. If you’re writing articles, you’ll need to choose keywords to use in the titles and content. If you’re building niche websites, you’ll need to use keywords in the domain name, the title and the content. If you’re buying PPC traffic, the keywords you choose will likely be one of the biggest factors in determining whether or not your campaign is profitable.

WordTracker is a very good tool for researching keywords. If you can’t afford to get a paid membership there (even for a day), they have a very good free keyword tool at

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com.

Google has their own free keyword tool, and you can glean some useful information and ideas from their results:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

There are also many paid solutions for keyword research out there. I’ve tried most of them at one time or another, and the one that I keep coming back to is Micro Niche Finder. It is easy to use, and I really like its ability to show you which keywords are most likely to be profitable for you.

I always recommend using more than one keyword research tool to generate keyword ideas, and then I use Micro Niche Finder to pare the big list down to something manageable and to identify the probable winners in that list.

To start your keyword research, you’ll first want to research a base keyword for your niche.

For example, let’s say you’re targeting the golf niche. You might enter “golf” into the keyword tool of your choice. Then the keyword tool will show you a number of related keywords.

You might come up with “golf clubs,” “golf tips,” “golf swing,” “golf bags,” “golf carts,” and “golf courses.” This is a short list of more broad terms. Then you need to research each of these broad terms in more detail to come up with even more targeted phrases.

You’ll want to eventually generate a big list of targeted keyword phrases that you can use over the coming months and years, so get started today!

Stay tuned for another marketing tip real soon, and good luck with your online marketing efforts!

To your online success,
Bill Brine, Home Small Business Coach

P.S. Here’s another great resource I created to help you build your business:

The Insider Trade Secrets To Generating Easy Online Income With Simple CPA Strategies