Keyword research is vital to many forms of online marketing. It’s utterly vital to successful pay per click marketing, and pretty amazingly useful even for regular websites and blog posting. Knowing what people search for really helps your site be found, however you market it.

There are a number of for pay keyword research tools out there, such as Keyword Elite, Micro Niche Finder or Market Samurai. Market Samurai has a free trial, but after that you have to pay.

Any of these can help you to narrow your niche, figure out the keywords you should be targeting in your ads, on page text or linking campaigns, but are they really necessary? Can’t you do it for free?

Mostly yes.

There can be some functionality you can’t get without paying, but there’s quite a bit you can do without spending a penny. Just some time, which you’d have to do with the research tools anyhow.

Google’s a great place to start, of course. Top search engine, the one most of us want to target. And they provide some pretty nice free tools to figure out what keywords to target for whatever purpose.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is a nice one. Free and you don’t have to be signed in to use it. It’s been around a while. You can tell it if you want broad, phrase, exact or negative matching to what you’re searching on. You get search volumes and a bit of a guide as to the level of advertiser competition for each suggested phrase.

But Google has more to offer. You can get some interesting data just from regular searches. Let’s start with a search on ‘home business’ (without the quotes, I’m not being too picky here).

Lots of results, of course. But the fun part comes in clicking the “Options” link just above the search results. Suddenly you can pick from videos, forums, reviews, past 24 hours, past week and more. You can also pull up related searches or look at related searches in Wonder Wheel form.

The Wonder Wheel really isn’t so different from the usual related searches, but it’s an interesting way to look at the results.

Some paid tools can give you some different data, but others give you little more than what Google will gladly share with you for free. Using Google also means you don’t have to wonder if the data is current.

And don’t forget one of the greatest keyword research tools ever – your own website stats! Pay attention not only to what’s bringing you a lot of traffic, but the obscure and interesting phrases that bring people in. You can find some interesting ones, and some will be profitable.

Whether you use a free or paid keyword research tool, make sure you’re using something. Guessing what people are searching for can only take you so far.

According to Search Engine Land, Google has a new bid simulator for AdWords users. From what their article shows, it looks pretty interesting.

In essence, it’s a tool to see what would happen as you change your bids. It approximates what happens as you raise and lower your bids.

Very useful if you’re serious about your AdWords advertising. You can figure out which keywords need a change, how much of one and about how much it will change your traffic.

If you know what you can afford to pay this can be a huge help in deciding if raising your bids will be worth it, or if you can drop them and earn more.

If you’re using AdWords, take some time and play with this toy. It’s on my list now. I’d love to see where I can get better results on my campaigns.

Getting a lot of traffic to a website is a wonderful thing. Trouble is, it’s not a guaranteed thing. Even when you have good traffic it can vanish away, especially when it comes at the whim of the search engines.

Free traffic in general can be hard to come by. It’s not really free, you see. If it’s not costing you money, it probably cost you a ton of time. Either that or you found a wonderfully rare niche to exploit.

Good traffic to a website isn’t a right. It’s a combination made primarily from hard work and persistence.

What if your site isn’t getting much traffic?

If you’ve had a site for a while and it’s still not getting much traffic, take a look at what you’re doing with it.

Have you published any articles for it on the big article marketing websites?

Have you tried guest posting on relevant blogs?

Do you have solid pay per click campaigns?

Does your site or server crash a lot?

Is your site friendly to search engine spiders?

There are a lot more questions you can ask if your site’s traffic just isn’t increasing. Just sitting there and saying “I have great content, so where’s my traffic?” isn’t going to solve anything.

Odds are, you’re one of thousands of sites on the same or similar topics. If you don’t stand out, not only to your visitors but to the search engines, you’re not going to do all that well.

Are there any quick solutions?

That depends in part on what you mean by quick. If you have a good Twitter following, for example, tweeting out links to some of your best stuff can bring traffic… provided it’s relevant to your following.

Building a real following takes time, and is something you should work on long in advance. Don’t bother with programs promising you thousands of followers; you want people who really read what you tweet, not just bots or other people trying to increase their numbers blindly.

Other social media can do well, although in many cases you’re better off letting it be discovered naturally by other users. Most sites strongly frown upon frequent submission of your own material.

You can of course increase your bids and tweak your pay per click ads. The risk here is that you may lose a lot of money, but if you keep in mind your conversion rates you should know what you can get away with.

Being written up on a bigger website can also bring a nice tidal wave of traffic. I got that one recently on another of my sites, and it was quite the experience. I really wasn’t all that prepared for it, but next time I will know a lot more about how to handle that kind of thing. It was pretty amazing.

But that one did take time. The interview was months before the article. Very, very much worth it, though.

The most important thing is to just not give up on it all. Keep working on building your traffic and getting it from more than just one source. The more sources you have for traffic, the less likely it is that all of it will vanish.

I was talking to my sister on the phone the other day. She was telling me about working extra hours so that she would have some more money for the holidays. That got me thinking about how challenging that can be in business.

Sure, a lot of businesses do better around the holidays. People do a lot of shopping at this time of year. If you have the affiliate links to the right products or sell them yourself, it’s a great time.

But if your business doesn’t pick up on it’s own, it’s not as easy as working a little overtime to earn extra money. You have to find new ways to bring in that money.

1. Offer a special deal on your own products.

If you’re selling and people just aren’t buying enough, try a special deal. Dropping the price is popular, but you could also do a joint venture with another marketer and have a discount when people buy both products.

2. Take on some freelance work.

If you have the extra work time use it to earn extra money. You can find work on eLance, the ProBlogger job board, SheLancers and other places.

3. Make use of any private label products you’ve been neglecting.

Especially if you’ve already bought it, why aren’t you making the most of your private label library? Many online marketers have a bunch of private label stuff they just haven’t gotten around to using yet.

Need a fast way to add private label articles to a blog? ZipPoster can handle it. It’s not something I’d do on a main site, but maybe a minor one? It’s a simple WordPress plugin that takes your text private label articles and posts them over a period of time for you. Add in a plugin such as WordPress Affiliate Pro to automatically add in your affiliate links to the articles, and you have a very quick (probably low quality) site.

Better, of course, is rewriting the private label articles enough to make them more unique, but if you don’t have the time sometimes the quick way is sufficient. Just don’t plan for it to stick around forever if you aren’t putting some extra effort into it. And you may not earn anything from the site. But if you have the stuff lying around, it’s a fairly small risk to take.

4. Don’t buy any ebooks that promise you will get rich quick.

Nah, won’t earn you any money. But that’s better than wasting money.

5. Join a focus group.

While it can be a bit difficult to find a focus group you qualify for in your area, they pay pretty well for the amount of time they take and Find Focus Groups makes it a lot easier. The opportunities are listed by listing date, not by the day the focus group will take place. They appear to be finding these mostly on Craigslist.

6. Sell your photos.

There are a variety of places you can sell your photos as stock images, such as PhotoShelter and StockXpert.

Is anything guaranteed? Nope. But the more ways you try, the more chances you have.

Despite the promises some people will make you about running a home business, it’s not all rainbows and kittens. And even once you start doing well things can go awry for a time.

Just call it learning experiences.

You can take the best instruction on how to build a home business out there, follow it to the letter, and still have things not work. Or they work for a time, then someone (often Google) changes the rules and you’re in a tailspin, little to no money coming in.

I’ve gone through a few of these. That’s why I’ve been working so hard on having more than one income stream.

Some of my income peaks have come at exactly the times I’ve needed them, such as when my son needed Doc-Band helmets to reshape his head after he had craniosynostosis surgery at 3 months old. The insurance only paid for half. My income somehow jumped up just nicely enough to let us handle that.

Then it just as mysteriously dropped.

Actually, I know why it dropped, in part. Great rankings in just one search engine do leave you very subject to the whims of that search engine.

When my husband was laid off, once again I managed to drive my income up, a bit more deliberately this time. Odd thing was that the week before his new job started my rankings started back down again.

Since this was more deliberate, I’ve been able to hold onto things better. I have a broader base of traffic coming in. Still, it would have been nice to hold the peak a while longer. Say a number of years longer.

Even though the lows are frustrating, I’m keeping in mind that each low is a bit higher than the one before. That’s because I’m learning with each one.

The more you understand about why things go bad for a business, the better you can work around the problems. This isn’t something you always pick up from ebooks, especially if what the ebook taught you is what changed and caused the drop in the first place. This is what you learn from experience.

What’s the Best Way to Get Experience?

I mentioned multiple streams of income. I love multiple streams of income. But until you have some idea as to what you’re doing, they’re probably just a distraction. Doing too much slows down your learning curve, and what might have been a drizzle of trouble with your business can turn into a downpour if it all crashes at once.

It’s often smartest to start with one focus. One site. One marketing tactic. Master that first, or at least get pretty good with it.

Once you’re comfortable, start adding on.

I generally try adding in marketing tactics first. You can start with pay per click for the quickest start, then do blog commenting to start getting search engine attention, then Squidoo lenses, article marketing, Twitter… in whatever order works for you.

You Can’t Stop All the Rain

No business will ever run perfectly smoothly, no matter how many streams of income, how many types of traffic you bring to your site, things can go wrong. That’s just life.

But the more you learn, the better your chances are. The harder you work, the better your chances are.

And if the rain’s falling hard enough, maybe there’s a new opportunity. Could it be time for a bucket?

I’ve been enjoying using Twitter these past few months. It’s an interesting way to meet people and to generate some traffic. Not a ton in my case, but some. Meeting people has been working better for me.

Twitter is highly social, a sort of instant messaging to a group, but you never know which of your followers will be paying attention at a particular moment. I’ve had interesting conversations with people who I know pretty much nothing about, aside from what they’ve posted recently on Twitter.

But yesterday I started seeing discussion on a new service, called Magpie. I put a nofollow on that link, folks, because I really don’t like the service. It’s just not what using Twitter should be about, even if you do other kinds of marketing there.

You see, it’s a service that puts ads into your Twitter stream.

If you’re marketing your own site or products, that’s one thing. But adding in someone else’s ads just strikes me as over the line and a great way to lose followers. I’m already seeing people say they will unfollow (link shows people’s thoughts on Magpie as well as what I think are Magpie tweets) anyone who uses that service to send them ads, and honestly, I don’t blame them at all. I’m likely to do the same.

Might hang around long enough just to see if people let it get obnoxious.

Really, I can’t see this as being worth anyone’s time. I know it will be easy to sign up, but do you really want to annoy people who decided to follow you because you say interesting things?

If you want to earn money from your use of Twitter there are better ways to go about it. Use affiliate links for products you really love. Mention your own sites. Above all else, keep it real.

Your followers on Twitter grow to have certain expectations from you. They quickly learn who does nothing but self promotion or promotion of other products, versus who has something interesting to say. Go ahead and market, but be sure it’s interesting.

Otherwise, you’ll soon be talking to yourself.

With the popularity of sites such as Squidoo, Twitter, Facebook and so forth, not to mention my own enthusiasm for article marketing, the question of how much time one should be spending on creating content for others does come to mind.

Is it a waste of my time?

So much depends on how you use it. Generating content for others can be a waste, but it can also be a great way to bring traffic to your own website. Shoemoney does well with it, for example.

We aren’t all Shoemoney or any other big name blogger, of course. Not everyone will get delightful amounts of traffic from such sources.

The key factor I consider is whether or not I can afford to be dependent on a particular source. The simple truth is that no business should be relying on a single source of traffic. If you aren’t trying to get traffic from a range of sources, what are you going to do when that one vanishes?

Of course, many people make the very good point that if you are creating content for other sites, you’re also helping them to earn money, rather than earning it for yourself.

Honestly, I don’t worry about that very much. It’s perfectly true that these other sites do need to earn money, and what I post on them helps them to do so. But so long as I also get a benefit I don’t see it as a huge problem.

Each source I use has something to offer me in terms of traffic or networking. I don’t get tons of traffic from Twitter, but I do get to meet some pretty great people, and I do get some traffic out of the deal.

Facebook I don’t use much, aside from finding old friends on. My business uses of that are minimal.

Squidoo has been something of an interesting experiment for me, but not one of my big traffic generators. Others have had different experiences. As with anything else, you in part get out of it what you put into it, and that one hasn’t drawn enough of my attention to get much out of it.

Article marketing, on the other hand, has been an interesting experience for me. While many of the links come from sites that aren’t that great, I’ve seen definite SERPs benefits that I consider to be most likely due to the links gained from article marketing. That’s not a bad deal at all.

If you look around, there are ebooks telling you how to earn money using any of these sites. There’s The Twitter Report, Squidoo Affiliate Destruction, and Facebook Fortunes, just to name a few. I haven’t read a one of them, so I can’t tell you about the quality of these particular titles, but they are out there.

The catch to using just one of these sites, of course, is that if they change the rules or vanish away, you’re out of luck. Over reliance can be a poor decision.

So why do I use any of these at all?

Just as with any other method, I know better than to rely solely on a single method, such as article marketing. You never know when the rules of the search engines will change and suddenly everything built from that method will mean less.

Fortunately, just because the rules change at one search engine doesn’t mean they will change at them all. That is one of the advantages of article marketing. If you can get your site up there in more than one search engine, you aren’t doomed by a sudden rule change.

Overall, it all comes down to being sensible about all your marketing tactics. Once you’ve mastered one, keep it up and start learning another. Just about anything you do online depends on another site to bring you traffic. Rely on that one source at your own peril.

I do a lot of article marketing for my sites. I enjoy it and get decent results for my efforts. But it’s sometimes hard to decide whether an article belongs on my blog or being distributed as an article for other sites to use.

Sometimes I do both. A few edits and it’s not the same article on my site as it is on others. But other times I can’t imagine doing that to a good article… err, blog post.

How to Decide Which to Do

Picking which way I go can be a bit of a pain. Sometimes an article that starts out as something I mean for article marketing ends up being something I would far rather have on my blog. There’s a difference that can be hard to explain. I guess you could say blog articles tend to be a bit more personal for me. Not too significantly, but there are some elements I can picture better on my own site than someone else’s.

And sometimes that means I need a new idea for the article site. It might be a twist on the now blog post. It might be an abbreviated version of the post.

Either way, a decision must be made. It’s almost a whim, no hard and fast rule. Just the feeling that the style or how personal I get goes better one way or the other.

Editing for Article Sites

If I choose to just edit it, there are a few ways to go about it. I don’t worry much about duplicate content issues. I don’t particularly want an article site outranking my site with one of my own articles, but it can happen. Even if the article is more thoroughly rewritten it can happen. After all, how many people are going to search for your article by quoting from its text?

I do prefer to keep the most thorough version for my own site. What goes to article sites should still be a good article, but mine should go one better.

Release Schedule

Of course, anything on my own site gets published first, by several days at least. It’s always good to have the content on your own site have first shot at being discovered by the search engines. A couple weeks is better yet in my opinion, but I’m not always writing far enough ahead to manage that.

Are They Really So Different?

Depending on your style, blogging and article marketing don’t have to be all that different. But they can be. I see my blogs as something more personal than what I want to send off to article sites. They need to have more of my personality.

Articles still need some of that personality, but I prefer to count on the information bringing people in through my article links. A hint of personality combined with good information strikes me as a good combination to bring someone to a blog where you continue with the good information and more personality.