In previous installment, we have covered a few tricks to identify a profitable niche using different tools including keyword research sites to determine if there is enough potential customers and profit potential.

Part 4 the niche marketing road map involves more in depth keyword research. It is easy to overlook this step, especially for a starter in online business. People tend to be impatient and want to jump right into building their website. But there is one thing more important than that.

Probably the closest to tangible thing in building an online business is to finish a website. Once a website done, especially if this is your first website, the satisfaction and glory really pay off. But, in this information age, no longer that people will come to your site just because you’re there.

The building blocks of a website that drive your potential customers, or traffic, are carefully chosen keywords. It is a big mistake to do this the other way around.

People can argue that search engines, particularly the free or organic traffic, are responsible to only a certain percentage of traffic coming to business web site. I agree to some extent. Indeed, as a marketer myself, I enjoy not having my traffic source from only one place.

Pay per click is by far one of the fastest way to generate on demand traffic. If you have a mailing list, that is a great way too, albeit I still prefer the former because it is available to everyone no matter at which level they are in their online business. Other source of traffic include viral marketing, word of mouth or referral marketing, joint venture traffic, and other ways to tap into other’s people traffic through content or advertising.

But still if you’re just starting, my favorite way to get free traffic is search engines. Many people just scare off when they hear the words, but really if you are building your business in a relatively lower competitive industry, your endeavor is going to pay off quickly.

Search engines traffic are free traffic. If you have a lot of time and not money, which is the case for most newbie, doing this right can bring you traffic for years to come.

I hope I’ve convinced you to go this path. We will talk about other source of traffic later and in other blogs.

With so many desktop software and web based application available for creating HTML page from scratch, the learning curve about creating a website has been cut tremendously. So don’t worry about that, for now just focus on getting strong building blocks for later steps.

If you have followed previous step properly, you should have a basic idea on how to use keyword research to find keywords related to your niche. There are many keyword research and software available today, but to avoid confusion start with Overture and WordTracker. Overture is free to use but WordTracker require subscription. There is a one day subscription available and one day is more than enough to do all the research you need.

The numbers given by Overture will be different from the data from WordTracker because they both gather their data from different sources. Basically you want to jot down the keywords that have more than a few hundreds of search per month.

There is no limit on how many keywords you want before you stop. Collect as many as there are possible. You also want keywords that really related to your industry, not random keywords that simply don’t make sense.

Quick Tip: If your list consists of less than 100 keywords, you have chosen a small industry, of which unless it is highly profitable niche, you want to step up a level and expand your coverage. Another acceptable way is to expand the theme. Think about additional keywords you can include to your keyword list, but still related to the main niche.