Competition and The Internet

One of the facts of Internet selling or web marketing is that you will have competition and probably more than you can imagine. Because of the competition the leaders in any particular field have often (not always) worked out ways of outsmarting the competitors. Be acutely aware of this the beauty, value, convenience of your product may count for nothing if your competitors have found ways of being found before you. Do not HIDE your efforts by accident or otherwise.

n contemplating any commercial venture and this includes Internet selling one of the first things to do (after finalizing a product idea not necessarily the product) is to examine the market potential and discover who and what is the competition.

In my particular case when i first started I had a book and needed to know if there was anything similar. I did what most other people who have a basic understanding of how the Internet works would do. I went to Google, the top search engine, even then. I typed in words like water gardening, ponds, pumps, biofilters and so on.

After many hours I was not really a lot clearer. However I did learn that there were millions of water garden and related Internet sites. It is when you do this kind of basic research that you quickly learn how competitive the Internet really is. By the time you reach the 27th result on page 3 of 192,345 search engine results all of which offer competition of sorts and you have not found what you want you realise that you are probably not going to find what you want.

After a few hours of this your attention span has diminished considerably and you are feeling a bit punch drunk. One other reason why single keywords are not good news for you as a potential web marketer aiming to sell products is that the searchers you seek must be focused, looking to buy. The last thing you want are tyre-kickers ( I love this phrase - I think it is out of America and describes casual lookers/shoppers/surfers/trade show visitors and so on.) taking up bandwidth. Single word searchers tend to be tyre kickers. They target nothing in particular

The good thing that came out of doing this monotonous research was that I realized if my book was to be found by potential purchasers using the search engine route then I had better make sure that my site came up on page 1 (or possibly page 2 and page 3 at very worst). If it did not then my chances of people even noticing my book never mind selling it them were close to zero.

Something else also became blatantly obvious: my book was not just a title. It was a collection of thousands of words. How did I know which words were more important than others which words were people using to find my kind of information. Truth be told I didn't know. I started to look at my book a bit differently and reached some devastating conclusions:

• A great book title is perhaps of no advantage when searching the Internet. The web page title is absolutely critical however as I later discovered.

• If my book was called for example Water Gardening and the web site I planned was also about water gardening then how the heck did someone looking for information on pond pumps find me? they would not was my conclusion.

• Then again which was the better word or phrase to use? . was it to be water gardening or pond pumps? I did not have an answer except to use both here I thought was my answer: it was to have two web pages. One page would be about pond pumps and the other about water gardening.

STOP, THINK ... Find Keywords.

This was starting to become a bit more complicated than I thought. After all, my book contained hundreds of words directly related to the theme or broad subject of water gardening. Which were more important than others and how did I measure this relative importance?

I was becoming more and more overwhelmed by the permutations and combinations and if truth be told was starting to question the wisdom of ever starting the project. I could imagine designing hundreds of web pages and not one would ever be found on page 1 or 2 of any search engine query results because of the vast number of web sites or web pages covering almost every conceivable subject

The words and phrases going through my mind I learned were called KEYWORDS in Internet jargon. Indeed as I learned more about the Internet and searching techniques the more important and relevant did keywords become.