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When Is 'spying On Your Competition' A Complete Waste Of Time?
By Ron Hutton, Sat Dec 10th
Copyright 2005 Ron Hutton Your brain screams "Gimme Fast", "Gimme Easy", "Do it for meautomatically"! So when you see the headline that reads... "Imagine Spying On Your Competition To Build A Massive TargetedKeyword List Of 3000 Or More Keywords On Auto-Pilot... In 10Minutes Or Less And Skyrocket Your Profits Quickly AndEasily"
You think "Hmmmm. Sounds good. Looks intriguing..." "Never Build Another Keyword List The Slow And Hard Way!" Gosh. Is it possible? "You must understand that this is a numbers game." O.K. Now tell me something not quite so obvious. The above headlines and subheadlines are quoted directly from asales letter for a relatively new piece of software (no nameswill be mentioned here) that's intended to eliminate all the"hard work" of doing keyword research. It sounds exciting. Nomore tedious keyword research. Yes! I find life is so much moreenjoyable when I don't have to engage my brain. Don't pull out your credit card just yet. With this particular product there's no need to review theentire sales letter to find out what else the software will dofor you. It's all nicely summarized in the very first headline. The sales letter includes a link to view a nice videopresentation demonstrating how the software works, and itcertainly appears to do exactly what the author says it will. Ihave no doubt that the program delivers on all of the promisesof the sales letter, but what exactly are you getting? Let's go back to the headline again... "Imagine Spying On Your Competition To Build A Massive TargetedKeyword List Of 3000 Or More Keywords On Auto-Pilot... In 10Minutes Or Less And Skyrocket Your Profits Quickly AndEasily" Again, I may be tempted to plop down one cool C Note, butwhat's wrong with this picture? What doesn't this software tell you? 1) Keyword search frequency. 2) The amount of competition forany keyword. 3) Keyword bid cost in Google Adwords and/or theapproximate value. When you take the approach of "spying on your competition", bevery careful not to give your competition too much credit forhaving done their homework. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't. If you generate a "highly
targeted" keyword list of 3,000keywords and you don't know the search frequency, the amount ofcompetition for any of the keywords, the Adword bid cost or theapproximate value, what do you do from there? ANSWER: Start over. Some marketers like to say that Wordtracker is just "SoExpensive"! Have you seen the price of a "Value Meal" atMcDonald's lately? "SuperSize It" and you've spent about thesame amount of money that it would cost to gain access toWordtracker for a day. As of the writing of this article, aone-day subscription to Wordtracker costs $7.65. If you've never used Wordtracker before, you can easily learnall of the "how to's" in a few hours by using their tutorials,which are very well done. Now you still have 20 hours to dointelligent keyword research. You'll have the answers to theimportant questions that you really should be asking, and you'llhave spent a whopping $7.65. Now that's an outstanding value. Just because someone creates a software application that"automates" the work for you doesn't necessarily mean that theinformation you'll generate is worth anything. Would you rather have... - A big fat hairy list of 3,000 keywords with no real usefulinformation about any of them. OR - A truly valuable list of keywords with the search frequencyand amount of competition for each and every keyword. Choose the latter. Begin with the end in mind. Formulate a plan. Think throughyour entire project and strategize. When you learn how to use Wordtracker efficiently, you'll beable to research 10 niche markets in a day without breaking asweat. When it comes to keyword research, there are some shortcutsthat you can take by using services like Wordtracker and evensome very good software programs, but don't give in to thetemptation to shift the gray matter into idle. There are effective ways to build content sites and there areother "click a button and build a bazillion page site" methods.The shelf life of the latter is getting shorter every week. In the words of the great Aretha Franklin, "Think.Thinka-think." About the author:Ron Hutton is a 20 year sales and marketing veteran with apassion for coaching and training. Subscribe to "GoThriveOnline", for big juicy marketing tips in small, easy-to-chew,bite size servings. 17 Free Cool Tools...http://www.gothrive.com
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