Good SEO and Marketing Can Sustain You Home Based Business In Tough Times

Worried about finances and slow sales in your home based business? Is it not time to reduce your SEO and marketing budgets? No. on the contrary, it is time to increase them!

While these areas may not seem important to the core of your business, it is essential to make you more money - especially when times are tough. Why? If you stop your promotional efforts, and your competition does not, you will lose market share that you may never regain. So instead of welfare scheme on PR, SEO and marketing, do the opposite ... find a way to increase your bet. And what should you focus on the best results?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
While you might think that SEO is simply adding some keywords for your website and using the tools that come with your hosting application or buying keyword ads, there is much more to it. Good SEO can actually get you to the top of the search engines and increase visitors and sales significantly, even in tough economic times.

Good SEO takes time, effort and knowledge. The right strategy will provide extensive keyword research, writing copy that sells and monitoring the work so you can get the best results possible. SEO is a great place to spend your money, but you must take the time to increase your knowledge in the area and then implement a sound strategy.

Marketing
Reaching out to potential customers or prospects is how you communicate what it is you can provide them. Marketing is the key to increased sales, and it involves a combination of advertising and SEO copywriting. For example, you can create landing pages on your site and then use advertising activities to get people to these pages. There are also e-mail campaigns, direct marketing campaigns, pay-per-click campaigns and more.

Today, marketing is a key to sales success, and covers all aspects of your home based business. Plus, with today's tools for monitoring, it is much easier to track what works and what doesn't so you can achieve the most effective campaign strategy.

If you are concerned about plummeting sales in your home business, do something about it! Double down on your SEO and marketing efforts

Keyword Research Tips For Affiliate Marketing

Keyword research is the first and most vital step in Search-Engine-Optimization (SEO), but many internet marketers have no idea how to effectively research keywords.  Keyword targeting is highly competitive and the research that goes into it must be thorough.

So many internet marketers are not done in by bad affiliate programs or poor products, but instead by poor keyword targeting.  Choosing the wrong keywords will all but doom any website hoping to generate organic traffic.

There are numerous keyword research tools available online to assist with selecting quality keywords.  Here are a few useful keyword research tips that will help in the selection and targeting of keywords for affiliate marketers:

1. Spend time on keyword research before selecting an affiliate opportunity.  Most affiliates, of course, choose an affiliate program and then begin the keyword research process.  Researching keywords prior to choosing an affiliate opportunity, however, gives affiliates an idea of the competition, popularity and demand for a particular online niche before committing to marketing it.  Finding an affiliate program to fit a selection of targeted keywords that meet the competition, popularity and demand criteria is much easier than doing it in reverse order.

2. Avoid keywords that are too broad.  This is probably where most people get it wrong when targeting keywords.  Sure, it would be ideal to rank at the top of Google and other search engines for broad keyword terms.  Unfortunately, unless you have an authority site or have cracked the SEO code, you will likely find yourself buried in the search engine abyss – never to be seen on page one.  And while broad keyword terms have ideal popularity, the traffic is not targeted and often useless when it comes to affiliate sales.  The key to getting conversions from search engine marketing is targeted traffic.

3. Avoid keywords with low monthly searches.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, some websites are doomed by low search volume for their targeted keywords.  You can think of this as “having the keys to Ferrari, but no gas.”  Ranking at the top for every keyword you target is great, but if those keywords generate no traffic, what good is it?  It can be fairly easy to rank for keywords no one uses for searching, but the ultimate goal is to generate traffic to earn income online – not rankings.

4. Use long-tailed keywords for better targeting and less competition.  A useful strategy for generating more targeted traffic and less competition is to use long-tailed keywords.  Long-tailed keywords are multi-phrased terms (usually three words or more) used to search online.  An example of a long-tailed keyword is credit repair for families (credit repair would be the general or broad keyword term).  Benefits of long-tailed keywords include: higher conversions on website traffic, less competition for ranking, and more targeted visitors.  If doing Pay-Per-Click advertising, long-tailed keywords are also cheaper.

Keyword research can be a tedious and time consuming process, but the rewards are well worth the effort.  Targeting the proper keywords is often the difference between an affiliate website flourishing or dying on the vine.  Make use of the free keyword research tools available online and use the tips mentioned earlier in this article for guidance.