Avoid Keyword Suicide in Your Network Marketing or Online Business

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Copyright © 2008 Trey Pennewell


If you're involved in Network Marketing or MLM - same thing, different verbiage - one of the biggest challenges you will have is driving traffic to your web site. Now this could be your product site or you business opportunity site.

In many Network Marketing companies (if not all), you are given replicated web sites to send traffic too. However, there is one basic problem with that, and that is... they are replicated web sites. Your website looks exactly like the website of the other people participating with the same company. Your websites look alike, and its keywords are exactly the same. The only difference between your site and that of your neighbor is that you might get to brand your website with your own name. (What most companies fail to tell you is that the search engines frequently ignore replicated websites.)

The most successful Network Marketers know that a replicated web site is all fine and good, but if you want to have control over the amount of traffic you send to your product or opportunity web site, you need to have a domain of your own.

Why?

The basic cornerstone of any web site is the keywords that the search engines are going to use to index your site. If you are using a replicated web site, the keyword structure is usually very generic and not site specific - that is the reason why search engines ignore replicated websites.

In order to have a successful web site, you need to have control over your site, starting with the keywords of that site and the links that lead to your sales pages. Besides that, you might have more than one network marketing opportunity to promote, and you cannot promote other opportunities from your replicated websites.

But the trick, for the lack of a better word, is NOT to fight to rank in the search engines for the same keywords everyone else is targeting.

This would be "keyword suicide".

Every boy and his dog are probably fighting to rank for the keywords: MLM, Network Marketing, Home based Business, and so on. Great keywords like these are all but impossible to achieve a number one listing through the organic search results (free listings in the regular search results). People who are expending their resources trying to rank for these very competitive keywords will usually go broke, before they achieve their goals or any profits.

You should understand that you don't need the "big gun key words" to drive a huge amount of traffic to your website, and therefore to what you are promoting. Start with what is called "fringe keywords". These are less-searched keywords that are still target-specific keywords for whatever it is that you are trying to promote.

Think about it, you can become a big fish in a little pond, if you target keyword phrases that the others have not thought of or that others did not consider worthwhile. But, if you target 100 to 200 fringe (smaller searched) keywords, which are averaging 1500 queries per day, and you multiply that by the 200 keywords your rank for, then all your targeted keywords are now getting a combined daily query of 300,000 queries a day.

By targeting lesser-searched keywords, your chances of being listed on the first page of the search engines just went up ten-fold, maybe even one-hundred-fold. Just imagine having a first page listing on 100 or 200 search engine results pages for these lesser-searched keywords; how do you think that would affect your website traffic? I will tell you from personal experience - it could be huge!

So where do you start?

Well if you are like most people, you head to http://www.Google.com, http://www.Yahoo.com or even http://www.MSN.com and start researching keywords. You punch in keywords, to see who has the first page listings and then head to those sites, and check out their keywords by viewing their source code.

Let me ask you a very important question: "Do you want to work hard, or do you want to work smart?"

Most people will choose the path of least resistance and choose to work smart, unless they simply do not know any better.

Doing keyword research is time consuming and it is hard work, so to make your job faster and more efficient; instead of going to Google, Yahoo and MSN to research keywords, you should be heading to http://www.Widow.com

I know you have probably never heard of Widow Search, but I will tell you now: if you are trying to do keyword research, you should forget about http://www.WordTracker.com and all of those other paid keyword research tools. I have found in my own experience that the keyword research tools are generally flawed and offer me only one piece of information that I cannot get from Widow. The one missing component is the estimated search traffic, but if you are targeting "fringe keywords", then the volume of search is a really small consideration in your strategy.

Widow.com is a Meta search engine. With one click of a button, you can get the listings for your keywords from Google, Yahoo, MSN, http://www.DMOZ.org and http://www.AllTheWeb.com

Here's how Window.com works: like most Meta search engines, Widow does not own the database; it creates what is known as a virtual database. It takes your request, in this case your keyword research request, to several other search engines and/or databases and aggregates the results into a single list and displays them according to their source.

Not only does Widow provide you information for your query from multiply search engines, it also has a Cluster Search feature. This feature is set as the default search setting; you can turn it off and just have a blended search if you prefer, but once you understand the power of a clustered search, I don't know why anyone doing keyword research would want it turned off. You can also set the number of result views per page.

Here's how the clustering feature is a huge time saver and its many advantages. Let's use the keyword phrase "Network Marketing" as the phrase that you wish to do keyword research.

Currently when I type in "Network Marketing", it is showing the top 10 results from the multiple search engines Widow accesses, but on the left hand side of the page is my Cluster Search Results. My cluster search results has provided links for the following:

Resources, Company, Multi Level, Companies and Income; there are more, but these are the top five cluster results. In addition, within each one of these results are even more results. Now many people say that all a cluster is doing is to attempt to display themes within your results. Yes, that is true and that is a good thing. Remember, the strategy I am talking about here is to find the keywords on the "fringes" of the primary keyword phrases, so themed results will allow you to uncover those fringe keywords more quickly and efficiently.

The cluster search results allows you to drill down into the set of your results and to do it all from one search engine and one search query.

Here is the other huge advantage of using a Meta search engine like Widow, over let's say Google (the big boy on the block). Meta search engines like Widow clear away all the clutter and paid listings that are found on search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

When you think about it, all of these search results on the big three search engines are competing for space and the attention from the user, for its paid advertisers. Web crawlers are influenced by cross-linking, Google-bombing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb), and the efforts by commercial webmasters to skew the PageRank (link popularity) scores. Therefore, the result given back to you is not a true picture of the available information, because of all the influential factors that are typically associated with search, can be manipulated by commercial enterprises.

However, a Meta engine like Widow must combine the search results and average those results (votes) from the related search engines to reveal more comprehensive and accurate results. Moreover, to keep the search result as unbiased a possible, Widow does include many paid search listings.

This benefits the user by eliminating duplicate hits and grouping the most relevant results at the top of the list. You are now doing a more efficient search of the web, and you're doing it with one search engine. Given that the Widow Search tool also incorporates Clustered Search Results and Similar Terms in its search results, the network marketer will find the task of keyword research greatly simplified and more comprehensive, than keyword-research gathered from another source. And more beneficially, Widow Search is a free service, available not only to webmasters and network marketers, but also to the general public.

So I ask you again "Do you want to work hard or work smart?"

Once you have used Widow Search as often as I have, you will finally understand that the old way is the "working hard" way and Widow Search is the "working smart" way. Check it out. I am sure that after you have used it a few times, you will agree with me on this one.


About the Author:
Trey Pennewell is one of the dozens of ghost writers creating content for the clients of http://www.thephantomwriters.com article marketing service. Trey's articles appear on numerous blogs, including many of the blogs that accept articles from The Phantom Writers article distribution service, such as the one located at: http://byte-sized-marketing.blogspot.com