If you’re trying to optimize a page for a popular keyword that has alot of competition, take a close look at the related keyword phrases.

For instance, let’s say you wanted to target the keyword “marketing”, that was searched for over 240,000 times on Overture alone in a month, there are 587,000,000 websites on Google competeing for that keyword, the keyword marketing is FAR too general and obviously has too much competition, sure if you got ranked #1 (would be very hard to do!) you’ll get a flood of traffic, but it wouldn’t be very targeted traffic.

Be more specific, target keyword PHRASES.

Let’s try “internet marketing” which was searched for 80,000 times on Overture in one month and has 62,800,000 sites on Google competing for the same phrase, that’s far better, not brilliant, but at least you’re more targeted now, but we need to drill down a little further to give us a fighting chance of getting good rankings on the search engines.

Now, under the keywords “internet marketing” over at Overture, searchers also used the following phrases:-

79764 internet marketing
6087 internet marketing online
4635 internet marketing strategy
2733 strategic internet marketing
2603 internet marketing consultant
2384 internet marketing consulting
2378 internet marketing service
2355 internet marketing tool
1929 internet marketing company
1855 internet web site marketing
1631 internet marketing san diego

There are many more phrases but I’m sure you get my point.

The keywords “marketing”, and “marketing online” are obviously going to have alot of rivalry, however, using research tools like KeywordElite will point you in the right direction on what you should target in your marketing strategy and show you the specific keyword phrases people are using to find products or information, and allow for you to see what the competition is for those phrases.

Did you notice the phrase “internet marketing san diego” from the list above? Well that’s a great phrase to target if you have a business there, and there are only 243,000 competing sites in Google, that’s quite targeted traffic, you won’t get as much traffic as being top ranked in Google as the other phrases but I can wager that you’ll make more sales!

What’s the competition like where you live? What specific products are people searching for to buy? What specific problems do people need solving? Alot of traffic is good, alot of targeted traffic is brilliant!

You can do all of the above and much more with KeywordElite, this tool is a must for any serious marketer! Not only will it find all the phrases that searchers are using for any niche, it will even tell you how much people are bidding on those terms in Adsense, which is great for PPC or if you want to build an Adsense website. 

Just make a list of all the blogs and their respective bloggers who according to you are making lots and lots of money. You will soon notice that all these blogs have content which people will find useful in some way. Each blogger in your list will have unique style of writing and every post will be unique in itself. Their blogs are also related to the topic in which they are involved and where their knowledge is matured enough to make useful contribution to online community. Thus, their blogs are flooded with lots of readers. Eventually they end up making good amount of money.

Exactly how much money they make from their blogs depends of variety of factors. The factors include but not limited to the number of visitors they get everyday and the approach used to turn their blog into some kind of money making tool. The blogs could be monetized using CPC advertising programs like Adsense or with affiliate programs. Sometimes, for your topic, adsense won’t provide you with high paying ads so you should focus more on the use of affiliate programs. Now, with this information in hand, let’s see how you can start your own blog that can earn you some real cash.

1. Think of a topic in which you can do some valuable contribution to online community.

2. Open a free account at blogger or at wordpress. You can also spend some money and buy your own domain name and host for your blog.

3. Write every post so that people will find it useful. Make sure it’s unique.

4. Use various marketing techniques to get visitors to your blog.

5. Get comments and feedbacks from your visitors and improve the quality of your blog and posts.

6. At the end, experiment with different approaches to monetize your blog. Make sure that while playing with advertisement programs, you won’t end up degrading the value of your blog.

7. Keep posting and keep earning.

The main point I want to stress here is that the first reason to start your blog should be to provide value to online community. If you can do that, then you will eventually end up making good money. If you try to hurry, you will loose precious visitors as they will find out that your motive is only to make money and not to help them. Don’t let this happen to you. Keep adding value and have an exciting blogging experience.

Anay Kamat is a software developer having experience in developing web applications in .NET and PHP. You can find many articles related to web hosting, website design, Ajax and PHP programming on his blog. Visit his blog at AnayKamat.com.