The internet is changing. If you could go back to 2003, Yahoo and MSN were the two big search engines. Mainly because so many people had these as homepages when they clicked on their Internet Explorer to get on the web and thus it was convenient to use their "search". Nowdays, Google dominates everything! It's a must to have good page rankings on Google to get people to view your web site. And it's from this web site that you will be making your money. Without the search engines indexing and ranking you up high, no one will even know you exist. (plus, search engine traffic is Free traffic)
So, there are certain steps you must take when starting up to ensure that you will not only make money but will get people's attention. The first step is RESEARCH. This is the most important step and should be undertaken before you just start jumping into the project.
RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH ...
There really can be no guess work when trying to start up an online business. Guess work leads to lost time, spending way too much money, and lost revenue. The "house" must be built on a solid foundation and that foundation is solid research. The beginning research revolves around finding the right niche in the market you are trying to get into and finding the right keywords. These go hand in hand as you will see.
The right niche is a profitable one that plays on a person's fear, needs, wants, or solves a problem that is plaguing that person. The best niches play to all those factors. Take travel, for instance, is a huge market (375,000 searches just last week just for the word "travel") and therefore hard to get noticed in. But within "travel", there are smaller, more targeted markets. You can find travel to certain countries. But here again, these are still huge markets to break into because of stiff competition.
If you were to focus on say, family travel (21,000 searches last week), you have not only narrowed down the niche but you can think of all the problems, needs, and wants revolving around a family taking a trip. Each of these can be a niche focus by itself. And this could be a profitable niche because the average pay-per-click for the keywords "family travel" is $1.56. An even more narrow niche would be "nurses traveling" (16,500 searches last week), with an average pay-per-click of $5.17.
So, the first research revolves around a topic niche and then narrowing it down to hot part of that niche which is more specific and one that you can make a 3-50 page website around. Notice that I was using keywords to do this research with. Keywords are what people type into Google or any search engine, to bring up the selection of web pages to view. So, I might go to Google and type in "New Zealand Travel" as my keywords to find Google's results on that topic.
KEYWORDS, KEYWORDS, KEYWORDS ...
Keywords are also what the search engines use to index and rank web sites for their results pages. And this is why keywords are so important to your research. You need to know which of these are the most searched for within your niche and make your entire website revolve around these. This takes some work, but well worth it.
Why are keywords so important other than being the mechanism that the search engines use to index and rank web sites? Because you are going to use them for the important parts of your web site and pages:
Your domain name will be based upon them
Your web site title will be based upon them
Your websitedescription will be based upon them and
Your web site content will revolve around them.
And these are the things the search engines look at most critically for page ranking.
You need to develop a "keyword list" before you do anything with developing your business web site. In fact, your business itself will be based on that list. The keyword list should consist of 30-100 or so of the most popular and valuable keywords for the niche you choose.
Where are you going to find the keyword information to do your analysis and develop your keyword list? There are two great free sources for this research:
http://inventory.overture.com/ and
http://goodkeywords.com/ . Just type your general keyword, like "travel" into either of these and they will generate related keywords and the number of searches for that word during the previous week. You can further refine your search by clicking on a more narrow, but related keyword to find even more narrowed keywords, etc.
This search will show you which of the keywords are the most popular and bring the most traffic through the search engines. But which are the most profitable? Simply go to Overture.com and you can find out how much money advertisers are paying per click for each keyword you have chosen. You will have to create an account to get that information. But don't worry, it's free (unless you want to do some PPC advertising but that will come later in the business).