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.

It’s been a while, but I am coming back to work on this blog again. I’m trusting that life will be reasonably manageable again.

‘Cause it’s sure been crazy lately.

Since I last posted, I’ve had a baby, moved, and had my Home with the Kids site featured in an article that hit the front page of Yahoo and Bankrate. That was one crazy day, and lead many people to check out this site as well. Rather motivating, really. Picture 65,000 page views before 10 a.m. on a server not ready for that kind of traffic.

It was awesome in a really frustrating kind of way.

Anyhow, I’m still unpacking, still dealing with a rather young baby, but ready to take back on my heavier workload. How else to keep building my business?

Any comments on what you’d like to see blogged about here will be welcome. Otherwise I’ll have to come up with my own ideas.

Yeah, I have lots of those, but I’d still like to know if there are topics you want that I might not have thought of.

It was very interesting watching the #motrinmoms saga on Twitter this weekend. For those who missed it, this ad is what is causing all the fuss. And if you’re like me and hate reading all that (literally) flipping text in the ad, here’s a blog that has posted the text of the ad.

I agree, the ad was a really poor choice on Motrin’s part. They clearly know nothing at all about babywearing, or that done right it’s not going to hurt. Not to mention how good it is for the baby. Most mother’s really enjoy the experience.

But what has been interesting to see from a business standpoint is just how quickly word spreads through social media. Ladybug Landings created a YouTube video on the responses.

Motrin responded pretty quickly, considering this started on a Saturday. The ad came off their site on Sunday. They also emailed some of the bloggers who had posted about it.

Where do I think Motrin blew it?

Primarily, they made babywearing sound like something moms do merely to be trendy. If they had talked to mothers who actually do wear their babies, they would have known better. It’s highly practical, and there’s a reason mothers have carried babies in slings for thousands of years. It’s also easier on the back than just carrying baby.

The word choices were very poor. Many moms expressed offense at the use of the term “supposedly” when the ad talked about the effects of babywearing and bonding with your child. Add in phrases such as “it totally makes me look like an official mom” and “if I look tired and crazy” and of course you’re going to leave mothers feeling insulted.

When you see something like this happen in social media, take some lessons from it.

Lesson 1: Know your audience.

If the ad execs had known much at all about babywearing, this ad would have been very, very different. There’s nothing wrong with pointing out the aches and pains of motherhood or of attachment parenting, but don’t mock it without understanding what you’re mocking. The attempted humor fell completely flat.

Lesson 2: Use humor with caution.

Done right, humor can make people remember an ad better. They may or may not remember the associated product, but the ad will be more memorable.

Combine this with the potential to deeply offend your target market, and humor can be very hard to use. It’s always a risk. People might remember the joke but not the product. They might hate the joke so much that they won’t ever want to use your product again.

Lesson 3: Keep an eye on social media.

This can be difficult. There’s a lot of social media options out there, and deciding which to pay attention to isn’t easy.

A simple Google Alert can help you keep track of what’s being said about your business, of course, although it’s not always enough. The Motrin fiasco spread in just a few hours, with many mothers tweeting their feelings on the ad.

Lesson 4: Consider the positives.

It stings when social media slams your product. It can’t be easy for any business to watch people trash their efforts and swear to never use their products. But you can take some positives away.

People are talking about you, for example. You know the old saw about bad publicity being better than none, right? It’s true enough. People start talking because you got them interested.

When people are talking about you through social media, you have the chance to interact with them. Figure out what went wrong and publicly do what you can to make it right. Contact the most vocal people who have been talking about your mistake and let them know you’re trying to fix it.

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.