If you don’t understand your target market and know what they are looking for you’ll be like a hamster in one of those hamster wheels: running and running but never getting anywhere.

So, today’s article is all about beginning again. If you’re up to your neck in marketing and ‘stuff’. Take a big step back and try this process out. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the results.

Go to these two sites to research your market and what keywords they use:
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Internet Market Research Starts With Keywords

Keyword phrases that are usually 3-5 words in length that get pretty high searches but also get low competition. That way when you have your product ready it won’t be too hard to get into google and get listed on the first page. You could even use traffic geyser to make a bunch of videos to promote the ebook and get that one the first page pretty quickly.

High Searches means:
- You’ll see in the SEO book it shows how many searches Google has DAILY. Just look at that and don’t worry about all the other columns. So, if a phrase gets searched on google daily more than 20 or 30 times it’s decent, 50-100 pretty good, 100-300 really good, 300+ even better, 1000 + and you’re golden. BUT the searches are not the most important part! It has to be low competition for you to get up there in the results quick. See next paragraph.

Low Competition means:
- Now go to Google.com and type in any of the keywords you liked. For example, “healthy pet food” – make sure you put quotes around the phrase. What you see come up with be all the listings for the phrase “healthy pet food”.

Watch the titles of the search results – if ALL of the titles have “healthy pet food” in the title then these will be tougher competition to get yourself on the first page, if only a few have the words in the title it will be easier.

Look up in the upper right corner of google and see what the number says. It will say something like “Results 1 to 10 out of 30,000″. If it’s 30,000 or less you have relatively low competition for this phrase and you should be pretty good to go. Of course the lower the better.

Let’s see a couple of examples:

Say you found out that “healthy pet food” had 600 searches per day and then when you checked the competition in google it only had 2 sites with “healthy pet food” in the title of the search results and competition of 200.
This is an excellent keyword!

Say you found out that “chemical free pet food” had 20 searches per day and in google had 9 sites with that phrase in the title and competition of 300,000.
This is not a great keyword.

Once you’ve found great phrases start making keyword ‘swipe’ files that you can use over and over again when you write copy for your website, add posts to your blog, write articles, post to social media sites and more. Make sure you keep your writing natural (don’t keyword ‘stuff’ articles) and you’ll start seeing very targeted traffic arriving at your door.

If you’re like some people who create their first information product to sell online (myself included), your first sales process might have gone something like this: Set up your website sales page, popped in the ‘buy now’ button, added your contact email and then waited for sales to roll in?

Well, I’m guessing if you have they haven’t rolled in nearly as quickly as you hoped, or maybe not at all. Putting up your sales page is just the beginning of the sales process.

Planning for sales should also start long before your sales page goes up and should continue long after. I know, it sound like a lot of work, right? Well, honestly, it is!

Selling online takes a lot of hard work and a lot of planning. So many people come to the internet hoping it’s some kind of magical cash machine. I wish it were myself, but really it’s a way to start a business and just like anywhere else a business is hard work. period.

Ok, enough lecture, more learning. Here’s what you can do to plan for more sales.

Keyword Research – Find out what your target market is SEARCHING for and they words they are using to find it so that you can speak their language right on your sales page. This is so important and so often overlooked. If you know your market inside and out, upside down then sure you can skip this step but most likely there is something you can learn from doing a little keyword research.

On the other hand. If this is a brand new market and a brand new product for people you don’t really know then you may need to do a lot of keyword research to make sure you are selling a product that people actually want.

Here are two great keyword research tools. Pay particular attention to Google results as they are the ‘search engine gods’ as it is:
http://www.wordtracker.com (paid version)
http://www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com (free version, not as good)

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

Headline – Your headline is a huge part of your sales process and should not be overlooked. Don’t just put ‘Green Widget’ at the top of the page and then add a picture and a price.

The headline really needs to sell the benefits of your product or service. Make sure the words are capitalized like in a newspaper.

Perry Marshall, Adwords Guru, made a GREAT suggestion in his book about looking at the headlines on magazine covers. He especially talks about looking at Cosmo because they spend a fortune on getting those headlines just perfect in order to get people to open up and read the articles.

Just think about it. Cosmo has a harder job than us – getting people to actually turn to the page where that article is – so their headline really has to work hard. Perry also suggested going to magazines.com which has tons of magazine covers for you to look at the headlines for. I highly recommend this technique! It will give you tons of great ideas for catchy headlines.

Tracking – I know all this keyword and tracking stuff doesn’t sound all that fun but you can be sure it will be fun when you know for a fact what makes you more money so you can do it again and again! That’s real fun.

I can’t say it enough. It’s all just guessing until we test it! Here is what I recommend and do for my clients for a simple salespage:

1. Go to Stattracker.com and sign up for a free account.
2. Set up the tracking for the specific page you want to track.
3. Add the code to your site.

I’m sure there are probably more complicated and fancy systems out there for tracking but this is quick and it’s easy, two things I know we all need. Now you will be able to see how many people are coming to your specific salespage. Use the number of sales you get per month and do this simple calculation each month:

(# of sales / # of visitors) x 100% = Conversion %

Once you know your conversion keep testing and tweaking. It could take a long time to get great conversions, yes, but once you’ve got a winner you’ll be very happy you did this.

So you see there is much more to making sales than just throwing up a product and being done with it. The better you know your target market, your numbers and what works for YOUR business the more money you will make.