Free Keyword research tools – are they worth it?

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Free Keyword research tools – are they worth it?

There are a great number of keyword and niche research tools on the market today and they vary in both price and effectiveness. In this article I want to take a look at three tools which are either fr5ee or offer a free trial.

 

The first and possibly most popular is the Google Keyword Tool which can be easily accessed by typing “keyword tool” into the Google search engine. You will have to key in a series of letters to show you are actually a human and you are then taken straight to the keyword search tool. You have the option of enter an exact, broad word or phrase into a box and after pressing “search “the  tool will then supply a selection of relevant keywords. There is also a guide to the competition for that word, Global and local searches and local search trends. It is a useful tool for initial keyword research.

 

The second is the service Wordtracker offers a free 7 day trial. Wordtracker has been around for a long time and provides a comprehensive keyword search facility. The basic trial is a restricted service and you are limited to the number of keywords can be generated. However, when you sign up for the 7 day trial there are a couple of useful bonuses such as an ebook and videos explaining how to use keywords. The full service also offers link building and  Strategizer  tools.

 

The final service is Market Samurai which is the newest of the three tools. It has been on the market now for about 18 months.

The complete program offers much more than just keyword research. Other features include rank tracking, competition analysis, content provision and site promotion. However, the trial version which can be accessed for free is basically their keyword research tool. This possibly contains more information offering details of SEO factors but also Adword traffic ands commerciality.

 

The advantage of Google Keyword tool is that it is totally free and can be used at any time. Wordtrackers trial only lasts for 7 days  and you must remember to cancel before the end of the 7 days if you do not want to automatically go onto their paid list. Market Samurai does not seem to have any limit on its trial but is obviously designed to attract you to its full service.

 

Which of the 3 tools you choose will really depend on how serious you are about keyword research . If you are serious about optimising your web site for traffic you may find that you will have to go beyond a free service. However they can be a very good starting point.

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Social Media and SEO: Do They Flourish Together

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Social Media and SEO: Do They Flourish Together

In recent years, online marketing has changed drastically. To be visible on the Internet is one of the most difficult tasks faced by web site owners. With the growth of internet, this problem will only increase. Social media experts are of the view that quality and rich content is the heart of social media optimization and an important key factor in a successful SEO effort.

Large portion of the online buying community rest their buying decisions upon recommendations from other fellow members. You can certainly make the use of Social Media Optimization process to reach these people to influence their opinion.

Social media experts strongly believe that SEO and social marketing go together. If you think of more quality traffic to your website then never rely on one source of traffic. For example, majority of your traffic is coming from a particular search engine and for some reason they make a change in their algorithm, then in all probability your site is likely to lose its prime ranking and along with that traffic also.

Content media writing is a major ingredient for social marketing. Social media experts make a great use of social media optimization process to harness targeted traffic. It’s the content that is instrumental to attract the visitors to your website. Content media tactics coupled with social media optimization can create huge amounts of traffic to the website.

Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Optimization are interwoven. Incorporating Social Media into the web site promotional plan is necessary. Social media twitter experts can also help a lot in bringing huge traffic to your web sites.

Social media experts predict that new media will have a fascinating impact on the final outcome of SEO as it is growing at the phenomenal rate. Statistics reveal that new media like Facebook and Twitter continues to add several million users at each month and more than 75% of the people who access social media through their cell phones prefer Twitter.

Social Marketing is predominantly about networking. Social Networking is being geared in a sense to offer benefit to the community. The benefit is made by the proper information dissemination process and by providing help to the community members. Usually, the information and value imparted to the community is primarily through business’s blog.

Social networking and social bookmarking websites are the tools of social media and they should be properly harnessed to have the effective marketing campaign. Social media twitter experts too can be viewed as an important tool to social media optimization.

SEO and Social Media are thus destined to flourish together. Social media experts can help a lot and provide an integrated solution to the ultimate objective of increasing web traffic in the highly complex environment of internet jugglery.

Amazon Offer Kindle for Sale in Europe – Will they Succeed?

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Amazon Offer Kindle for Sale in Europe – Will they Succeed?

Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader is now on sale in the UK and Europe, shipped with a US power adaptor supporting voltages of between 100V and 240V so that it can be used anywhere in Europe. Amazon began offering the Kindle to Europe in late October 2009, thus breaking down the one barrier to its potential domination of the e-reader market.

It is not, however, sold from local Amazon sites such as Amazon.co.uk, but only from the American main website Amazon.com. It is sold in American dollars, and shipped from the US, although it is ordered by Europeans using their regular accounts. So what benefits does the Kindle offer over the other e-readers that have been available in Europe for some time and that most people interested in eBook readers now own. Examples include the Sony PRS, Cool-er and iRex, though there are several others against which the Kindle now has to prove itself.

It is being offered globally on the 3G network with no charges for the wireless connectivity that is used to download eBooks directly to the Kindle. However, blogs and the web browser they are experimenting with will not be available.

Is it too late for Amazon to enter the European market? Initial signs are no. Sales have been strong, particularly in the UK and Western Europe, where it appears that intelligent consumers are going for the Kindle’s range of features rather than looks. However, the strength of the iPhone in Europe could be serious competition once this has been modified to a fully featured e-reader. Apple is not known for being left behind in any technology. Furthermore, as it was noted in the article “Is the Future of Books in Mobile EBook Reading?“, the future likely lies in a portable digital reader that downloads and plays music, offers internet access, incorporates a digital camera and can be used as a mobile phone (Digital Book Readers).

The electronic libraries available to Kindle users are vast, with Amazon offering over 200,000 titles in the English language, and publishers such as Penguin, HarperCollins and Faber and Faber signing up to offer Kindle-compatible titles. To date only US newspapers and magazines are available, but it should not be long before the top UK and European newspapers are added to the list.

As stated, prices are in US dollars, and a Kindle currently sells to the UK from Amazon.com for 9 plus local customs, taxes and other charges, although accessories such as a charger, leather case cover and users guide are available from local Amazon sites in local currencies. In the UK that price equates to £157 UK – compared to the Sony PRS-505 at £225, the BeBook at £240 and the Cool-er at £190 (all to the nearest pound), then the Kindle appears to be the best deal.

You can get the Sony e-book Pocket for under £160 if you know where to look, and all of these products can be purchased at lower prices elsewhere using internet price comparison websites, but these are the basic prices on Amazon and a brief survey has indicated that they differentials are generally maintained elsewhere.

However, buying from the US site, it is not possible to find the actual price including duty and delivery until you actually provide your payment details. On doing that the price is £202.63: It still beats the Sony PRS and BeBook price, and given the limitations of the Cool-er and the size of the Sony Pocket that is cheaper still, there appears to be no reason why the Kindle should not be as successful in Europe as it is in the USA.

So what benefits does the Kindle offer over these competitors? Probably the backing of Amazon, the largest eBook distributor on the planet, is sufficient reason in itself. Add to that the amazingly clear screen with its e-ink technology, and everything that anybody could want in an e-reader, and then you have your answer. Add to that the 3G, that means you don’t have to dock your reader to anything, and it doesn’t even have to come within a 100 miles of a computer to work, then its competitors are dead in the water.

The battery has the longest life ever, and everything about it is about ease of use, ease and speed of download and storage capacity for 200 books, this has everything. Add to that the MP3 player that plays through built-in speakers or headphones that it shares with iRex (the Sony needs headphones), then you have a machine that is top of the class, and for which only the price was not right.

Now that the price is right in Europe compared to that of the competition then there should be no holding the Kindle back. At least not until Apple find a competitor to 3G to enable rapid downloading of eBooks, and then the world of e-readers will come alight again with a battle royal that Amazon might not relish – but knowing Apple, they will love!

Keyword Research Tools – Are They Worth the Expense?

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Keyword Research Tools – Are They Worth the Expense?

One of the first things you learn as an Internet marketer is that keywords are the foundation of your campaigns. By knowing the search volume of any given keyword you can estimate a demand for any given product or a service. As with anything marketing related – someone is going to try to convince you to buy the newest keyword tool on the market. Most novice marketers of course will want to know which keyword tool is the greatest.

Though if you take your time and learn a bit more about keyword tools – you’ll realize that it’s really the wrong question to ask. Your question should really be: ” Are any of those tools even worth a single dollar?” Of course most of the affiliates who want your commission – will gladly give you gazillions of reasons on why you absolutely can’t live without one. Well, I would like to dispel these beliefs, and save you from potentially making a costly mistake.

What you need to know about keyword tools that most people won’t tell you:

Keyword research is not exact science. All of the figures you see when you get the results are predictions. Keyword tools such as Nichebot use scraped data from sources like Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery, which only represent at most 2 -3% of all the keyword searches done online.

Search engine keyword data is stored information from the past. Most of the search figures you see are searches from a few weeks ago. And those figures tend to fluctuate wildly because of search engine’s constant cycle of recording and updating its databases.

Anyone who will tell you that their keyword tool has the most accurate data is lying through their teeth. Even Google, having its firm grip on over 50% of the search market can’t guarantee 100% accuracy of their keyword results.

With all this said, most paid keyword tools scrape majority of their keyword data from Google anyway. So in essence you’re paying for re-packaged middleman keyword data.

At first glance a tool like Market Samurai may seem useful – because they organize your keyword data based on the competition and break down the daily search volume. They also offer a few other things like SEO competition and content pulling based on your search.

But it’s really nothing that you can’t accomplish yourself, with a few extra mouse clicks.

In conclusion – in my opinion – paying for keyword tools is not only a waste of your money, it’s also a big waste of your time. Mainly, because all of those keyword tools happen to be turtle-slow.

Save your cash and head to Google’s own keyword tool. It’s free, fast and has the most recent results out of all keyword tools out there.

Alex K is a marketing expert whose website is dedicated to reviews of top quality Internet marketing products. One of his strongly recommended online training resources can be viewed at the link above.

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Online Marketing, Web Marketing, Search Marketing: Are They the Same?

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Online Marketing, Web Marketing, Search Marketing: Are They the Same?

It involves the planning, creative design of, and presentation of information intended to gain, satisfy, and keep customers, along with the measurement of the effectiveness of the marketing effort in light of the money spent.

Businesses traditionally used printed publications such as magazines and newspapers, postal mail, radio, and television as platforms for their advertising, and they still do that. But late in the twentieth century, a new platform for marketing emerged with the growing popularity and use of the internet. Businesses across the world are now able to reach prospective customers and clients through the internet. Marketing campaigns now include advertising online as well as advertising through the traditional platforms. This has spawned new types of jobs and new types of service companies that offer assistance and expertise in targeted online marketing and getting the most out of the online advertising dollar spent.

The Question: Are Online, Web, and Search Marketing the Same?
In the online world many terms are used loosely, and sometimes they can be downright confusing. Web marketing refers to having information available on the World Wide Web for prospective customers to see or hear. They would only be able to do that if they were connected to the internet which is a system of connected networks and computers that actually connects people from around the world. A computer that is online is connected to the internet right then and allows interactions between the user and the online web pages.

Generally, when online users are interested in information on a particular subject or item, they will use a search engine to guide them to some web pages that are relevant to what they are seeking. The relevance of the web pages shown in the search results depends in large part on them containing the keyword the searcher entered into the search engine search field. So if a business has carefully crafted its website to contain the proper keywords that are relevant to its products or services, it is more likely to get exposure in what is referred to as natural search results. This is one form of search marketing. But businesses can also buy exposure on search results pages through the use of keywords. They can pay to have a link to their chosen web page show up in a different area of the search results page. The more popular the keyword, the more the business has to pay to have a link to its website be among those displayed when someone types that keyword into the search box. This is referred to as paid search.

So, in effect, online marketing, web marketing and search marketing all refer to the same thing, marketing to internet users. There are some nuances that differentiate among them, but in general they are the same. There are other ways for prospects to be directed to a website besides through a search engine. They may have the exact website address, so they do not need to use a search engine. They could have gotten the address by word of mouth, or they could have gotten it from a business card, a radio or TV ad, or a billboard. Or they may have encountered a link to the website while they were on some other site. But since search engine use is the dominant method used to find information online, thinking of and approaching online marketing from a keyword search or search marketing basis is wise .

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Your Customers: Who are they and what do they want?

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Your Customers: Who are they and what do they want?

Choosing demographics and your targeted audience can be slightly different on the Internet than it is in the offline world. You can find new niches to market to, niches that don’t exist in the offline world.

No matter how good your product or service is or how great your sales copy is, the key part of your marketing plan is finding the right crowd: a starving crowd.

Ask yourself what that means in your business. Think about the ways that you can locate and identify a starving crowd.

Now start to think about the ways you can create a feeding frenzy. This will become more defined as you go along. But start planting the seeds now. Ultimately this will be the most important question you ask yourself. Keep in mind that there might be more than one distinct crowd of people that would appreciate what you offer. This is great. However, each niche needs its own targeted marketing campaign.

Now, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Who is your target audience?
2. What do they want?
3. How can you motivate this target audience to act now?

Make a list of all of the benefits of your product or service. You will be doing this again at different stages of this process. However, it’s a good idea to consistently rehash this. You will discover new benefits you had never thought of. Keep in mind that your product or service’s benefits are different from the features. People don’t respond to features. People respond to benefits, because it answers their first question: what’s in it for me?

Once you begin to develop a list of benefits, you can start to think of what kind of person would benefit. Yes, there are probably obvious answers to this, and those are important. But push a little more and see if you can discover who else would fit the profile.

If you want to know what some wants, just ask. Do a search on the Internet for forums in your business niche and go visit them. These are forums where people discuss issues and ask questions about your field. If it’s a popular forum, you will get a lot of answers. Make sure you browse through the different posts as well. You will begin to see not only what people want and what people like, but you will also hear what they hate. You will hear them tell horror stories. Take this to heart. This might be some of the most useful information you could ever get.

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Meeting Legal Clients Where They Want to be Met, Online – With Internet Marketing

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Meeting Legal Clients Where They Want to be Met, Online – With Internet Marketing

Let’’s be honest. To many first time clients, the idea of visiting a lawyer may seem a bit like enjoying a root canal.

There is nothing fun about it. The client is almost always apprehensive and intimidated. They might like nothing more than to simply vanish. Sure, they have a legal issue they need to discuss, but for some reason the first visit to an attorney is always the hardest.

A law firm is intended to help victims and defend the defenseless yet consumers don”t go out of their way to look for one.

They will however look for legal advice on the Internet. This is where you must meet them.

When it comes to marketing your law firm; the use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the best and most cost effective way to get your website noticed.

Maybe it’’s all the television shows that feature Hollywood actors as attorneys that convince the general public they are intimidating, but the truth is lawyers are simply everyday human beings who have homes and families along with a knowledge of the law. Their expertise can help clients through many difficult circumstances.

New clients are finding thousands of attorneys to handle their profitable cases online daily, and if you aren”t capitalizing on this potential – you can be making a devastating mistake. Getting them to click on your link is what Search Engine Optimization is all about. In essence you are competing with other law firms for the best rankings, when it comes to a very specific set of keywords or phrases. SEO is a marketing process that works to carve out a sizeable niche and allows your site to get noticed in areas your law firm specializes in.

The Internet is not a novelty that will simply wear off while life goes back to normal. In so many ways the online world has radically transformed the world we actually live in. You must connect with those who frequent cyberspace if you want your firm to succeed to the greatest degree possible.

Learn everything you can about optimizing your website and don”t be afraid to bring in specialists who can help grow your website into a premier online presence that can also catch the attention of search engines. The future of your practice will be more prosperous if you place focus into an online marketing campaign today!

Internet marketing doesn’t need to be frustrating experience if you are careful and ensure that you find a talented and high quality service provider. Once you locate a legal internet marketing company with proven success, begin your search engine marketing today! The faster you start, the easier it will be to succeed, since the rat race has begun – you can’t get left in the dust.

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Keywords – Are They Costing You A Fortune In Internet Sales?

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Keywords – Are They Costing You A Fortune In Internet Sales?

Keywords are phrases that people enter in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to find information, services, businesses or products. It’s how customers find us and buy. But, the Internet is a billion dollar industry and lots of businesses use various strategies to rank in the top 10 search results in these search engines. Statistics say that mostly people do not look beyond the first 20 search results. This data clearly shows how important it is to rank among the top 20 results or your business is not reaching your customers..

To find a pet shop in Los Angeles, we might type “pet shop in Los Angeles” in the search bar of a search engine. “Pet shop in Los Angeles” are keywords. The search engine will now crawl through millions of web sites and will bring up the most relevant results. The first 20 results are the ones to get the most business.

In order to get your web site ranked in the first 20 results, you need to perform a detailed keyword research. This research will help you find the most relevant keywords that people write to find the services you are providing. For example, if you own a “barber shop in San Jose, California,” just type the keywords in quotation marks and you will see the relevant results and what other companies are advertising using these keywords.

Now pull up a web site that is in the first listing or two and study it for the keywords. When you view the page source, you will see the different keywords. They are all highly relevant and that is what most people type to find a barber shop. After studying the various keywords on the page source, you should then read the text on home page and see as to how the keywords are being used in the text.

Keyword density is a very important aspect, as search engines mark high density keyword inclusion, in the text, as spam and those web sites are not included in the search results. When you are going through the text, you will find various keywords and how they are used. Now you can include them in the written words on the page as well as in the keyword meta tags that you saw by viewing page source.

Once you have added these specific keywords to your web site, it will take some time till the search engines crawls and registers them. After that, every time a person types, “Barber shop in San Jose, California,” your web site will be among the top results. The different keyword variations that can be used are “barbershop in San Jose,” “San Jose barbershop,” and other combinations.

Keyword research, analysis and inclusion in the web site is a professional’s job. This all comes under the bigger umbrella of search engine optimization. If you think don’t have the time or skills for keywords, it is best that you consult a professional.

What Are Some Good Pay Per Click Affiliate Programs And How Do They Work?

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What Are Some Good Pay Per Click Affiliate Programs And How Do They Work?

There are many types of affiliate programs on the internet. However, the easiest ones to make money with are the pay per click affiliate programs. Understanding how these programs work is an important step to making money with them. So how do these programs work?

With pay per click affiliate programs you need a website of your own in order to participate. When you join these types of programs, they require you to add some HTML to your website. What this does is put different text, or banner test ads on your site. Then when someone clicks on one of these ads, they will be taken from your website to a different site. The way you make money is when someone actually reads the ad, and clicks on it. The advertiser is spending money on that ad, and you get a small portion of the ad revenue.

One thing you need to realize is that you will need to learn how to get traffic to your site. If you don’t know how to do that you will not make any money on pay per click affiliate programs. Traffic does not mean “hits” that are generated by search engine robots. It means real visitors or unique visitors. People who will actually read the ad, and click it.

There are all kinds of ways to get traffic to your website. There are free, paid, short term, and long-term advertising ways. To learn how to do this, you need to educate yourself on how to market your website. Do a search on any major search engine for internet marketing courses. You can also find ebooks, or a mentor to help you learn how to do it. However, this is a must if you want to make any money with pay per click affiliate programs. Without the right education you will not get anywhere.

So what are some good pay per click affiliate programs? The first one is Google Adsense. I am sure that you have heard of it, but if not here is how it works. You need to have a website to place their ads on. You also need to be able to provide good unique content. If you can provide this content, you will start building traffic to your site over time. Google is one of the biggest search engines on the internet. So they already have a huge network of advertisers.

Another good one to use is SearchFeed. This is similar to Google Adsense. The one difference with this pay per click program is that you can choose which keywords you want to target for you ads. They also have different ad options that you can use. You need to decide which ones would work better for your website. Check it out to see what different ways you can make money with this program.

Then there is the Yahoo pay per click affiliate program. Their program is called publisher network. To be able to participate in this program, you need to have a couple of different things. One of them is a valid US social security number or a tax ID. Your website also needs to be targeted to people in the US, and majority English. If you have all of these, than you can participate in their program.

There are a lot of good pay per click affiliate programs out there. You just have to do a search to find them. I have only given you a few of the bigger ones on the internet. These are by no means the only ones. Pay per click affiliate programs are a great and easy way to make money. As long as you have a website to place their ads on, and you know how to drive traffic to your website. So learning about and using these types of affiliate programs will definitely be to your benefit. Just make sure you take the time to find out about the affiliate program, and educate yourself so you can make money with these types of programs. Believe me, you will be more than happy that you did.

Copyright © Melody Heddings

Internet Ads, why and how are they used to great effect?

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Internet Ads, why and how are they used to great effect?

A common feature on the World Wide Web is advertisements and, in particular, banner ads. Everyone has seen them, they are rectangle in shape and come in different styles, designs, layouts etc, but all serve one universal purpose, namely to promote a product or service.

For publishers at least this form of advertisement is hoped to serve two purposes. Firstly it is anticipated that the internet user will see the banner ad, like either the ad itself or the product and/or service it is promoting and click on it to visit the publishers website. This means that the publisher has gained 1 visitor it would not have had if that banner had not existed. It is even better if the visitor buys something from that site then the banner truly is a success. Secondly the publisher will hope that the banner itself will register somewhere in the visitors sub-conscious so that it returns to them at a later date. Then they will go and check out the product and/or service by themselves.

However having a flash, creative and appealing banner will not do any good unless it is properly targeted. By targeting I mean on websites that are relevant to the product or service that you are promoting but getting hits from these sites as a result of your banners your pagerank will increase as well. Publishers aim to get their banner exposed in 3 ways: banner exchanging whereby you agree to display another companies banner on your site in exchange for them displaying yours on theirs; paying other sites to display your banner; and paying a banner organization network to display your banner on several different sites. All of these can be extremely effective in marketing your business.

However banner ads are but a small part of promoting your product or service, especially if you are an affiliate. While they serve a very good purpose and have evolved into one of the main ways in which companies can gain exposure there are many other methods as well that, when all combined together, can carve out a great career for yourself in affiliate marketing. It should be noted that the above information is not just confined to banner ads as the purpose can also be attributed to text ads as well.

This leads to the inevitable question of which is better, text or banner advertisements? It is questions like these that you need to answer to become a successful affiliate marketer but we don’t expect you to figure all this out on your own, help is at hand. The Secret Art of Successful Affiliate Promotions’ can provide you with the knowledge to answer these sort of questions and decide which way of advertising is right for you.

Unfortunately most affiliate marketers do not know how to successful promote, expose and market the product they have chosen to front therefore their career in affiliate marketing will end before its even really began. Promoting your product is perhaps the most vital aspect of the affiliate marketing niche and should be one of the first researched topics.

To learn more about affiliate marketing, check out the free Successful Affiliate Promotions report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.