Keyword Competition - How Many Do You Have to Beat?

This is the 6th in a series of blog posts about Search Engine Optimization, if you haven't seen the earlier articles in the series, check out our archives section on the right hand side of this page.

When you do a search for a keyword phrase in your favorite search engine, it will usually tell you how many matching pages contain the phrase you searched for.

For example, by typing the phrase "elvis collectibles" in quotes, returns the first 10 of 40,300 results in Google today. Without the quotes around the phrase it shows that there are 798,000 results.

The question is: do you have to worry about trying to beat 40,300 competitors, or 798,000? The answer, in my way of thinking, is neither. I would want to just worry about beating 10 of them, specifically the 10 that show on the first page of results. And it wouldn't be the end of the world if I just started out by beating half of those 10, to be honest.

On the other hand, if I can beat 40,000 competitors, but not the top 300, it doesn't do me a bit of good!

So the goal in search engine optimization should be to determine what the top ten are doing correctly, and either match or beat them in that regard, in relation to the factors that contribute most importantly to your search engine ranking. Those factors are on-page content (primarily making sure that the keyword phrase is in your title tag, meta description, H1 tag, URL name, and page text), and off-page content (inbound link quantity, quality, and anchor text).

How important is the last paragraph to your business? Let me put it this way. If you are #301 of 40,300, you'll be just about as successful as #40,300. You can probably say the same for #201 and #101 also. How often do you bother browsing to the 11th page of search results for something you typed in?

SEO involves simply (sure!), first of all getting your page crawled, and then making sure it is optimized so that the on page and off page content mentioned two paragraphs earlier are spot on. An understanding of this concept puts you ahead of the bottom 40,000 pages. An ability to perform those tasks will put you on the first or second page for just about any search phrase, except for the most competitive of them. It's just that most web page authors currently just don't have a clue about how to rank well. If you do, good for you, it shows you care about your visitors enough to make it easy for them to find you.

By the way, our site is currently #7 of 798,000 without quotes, and #4 of 40,300 with quotes for "elvis collectibles", as I write this post. And it's a fairly new page, so it's quite a feasible task for anyone with the understanding and desire. Where we are when you look can vary, results go up and down daily or more frequently, there is always some fluctuation, but once you get to the first page or two, you're in the game.

It's my desire to teach you how to rank a large number of your pages on the first page of search results. We have thousands of pages in our site, it would be a daunting task to determine where each targeted keyphrase ranks, and no one, even the experts, can land on top for every phrase they target. The ability to know how to rank higher for important key phrases can make or break your business.

Additionally, once you "get it" in terms of understanding what search engines are looking for, if there is a particular page that's important to you, you may be able to improve your results dramatically, simply (thare's that word again!) by researching what the top ranking competitor is doing, and try to match or beat.

Of course, if CNN is #1 for your phrase, with their PR of 9 and 110,000 backlinks at this moment, perhaps you should target another phrase (or settle for #2 or #3).

See you next time, until then, go out there and see what you can improve on your pages, it can be well worth it.

Factors That Influence Your Search Engine Ranking

This is #5 in a series about search engine optimization (SEO). If you just now found this blog, check out the archives for the other articles.

Today, when I talk about search engine ranking, I'm referring to where your page is ranked in the search results, not about PageRank. Where a page is ranked is based on a large number of factors.

Each search engine is different and all the important engines, at least, keep their formulas highly classified, and are constantly tweaking their algorithms.

However, the three main factors that influence where your page lands are:

1. the keyword phrases that are mentioned in your title, meta description, and heading tags, as well as in your on-page text.

2. the number and value of incoming links to your page (basically the PageRank value for Google, perhaps just the number of links for other search engines).

3. whether or not the anchor text of the incoming links to the page contain the keywords being searched for.

It is the belief of many experts, and myself, that submitting to search engines is a waste of time and effort. Additionally some suspect that there is sometimes a penalty for manual submission to some search engines, including at least temporary delisting, if a page is currently listed, until such time as the engine has a chance to recrawl and reindex your site.

Of course, if the search engine is one that accepts paid submissions, then of course doing so will be necessary, but in the case of search engines that offer free inclusion, specifically the biggest and the most important (Google), I would recommend making sure that your site is linked to from a page already indexed by Google, preferably one that is crawled often.

To accomplish this, you should take the time to get linked to by a site related to yours, be it a directory in your industry, an all purpose directory, or another site that you own that has a related topic.

Since there are hundreds of directories that will accept submissions, spend the time to find some that will include you quickly, even if you have to pay a submission fee. Try to find one that is either free or charges a one time fee (as opposed to an annual fee) in the beginning, then sit back and wait for your site to be crawled.

That's all for today, see you again soon.

Search Engine Optimization - how is Google PageRank calculated?

One of the major things that made Google become the currently dominant search engine is their utilization of a proprietary formula called PageRank.

The "page" in "PageRank" actually comes not from "web page", but from "Larry Page", one of the founders of Google. However since it is used to rank the importance of a page, you can think of it either way.

When he was at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a complex formula to determine, all other things being equal, which web page of several (or several thousand) is more important and thus should be ranked higher in search results.

If you're interested in search engines and history, a very interesting historical document is this paper about "The Anatomy of a Search Engine" which was written by the Google founders when they were at Stanford University. It explains many of the parts of the algorithm that eventually became the Google search engine. Of course, the algorithm is changing frequently, so you can't take every part of the original paper literally. Still, it gives good insight into things that are important in search engine optimization even today.

The main criteria in the formula behind PageRank is the number of incoming links to your page, how important those linking pages are, and how many links are there on the page they're coming from.

PageRank is the way importance is measured, and is shown on the Google toolbar as a scale from 0 to 10, 10 being the highest. If you read the paper linked to above, you'll notice that all indexed pages on the web will average to a PageRank of 1. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that a PageRank of 1 corresponds to a Toolbar PageRank of 1, I'm not sure if anyone outside Google knows the true correspondence. Perhaps the average web page shows 3 on the toolbar, but it doesn't really matter because everything is relative to every other page on the 'net.

In this discussion we'll use the Toolbar PageRank in numbering. A PageRank of 10 is not twice as good as a 5, because Google uses some sort of logarithmic scale where the difference between 0 and 1 is less than the difference between 1 and 2, 2 and 3, and so on. Some have guessed at the logarithmic value to be 4, some guess 6, some guess 10, again it's probably not terribly significant. Maybe it's 3.764, I don't know, but it possibly changes monthly in order to make sure that the original premise that the average page is ranked PR1 holds true.

The "secret" formula is such that if you have an incoming link from a page with PR5, it is usually more important than a link from a PR4. I say usually because the number of links from the page also is taken into consideration. In other words, if you are the only link from the PR4 page, you get 100% of the transferred value (adjusted for the "damping factor" explained further below), while if you get a link from a PR5 that links to 100 pages, you only get 1% of its value. So let's assume that the logarithmic difference between ranks is 4, that means a PR5 is 4 times more powerful than a PR4, so if you're getting only 1% of the PR5 value transferred to you, or 100% of the PR4's value, I'd prefer the PR4 link.

But hold on. All PR4's are not equal, and all PR5's are not equal. The PR is a range of absolute values. So for example, if the logarithm used is 4, then a chart can be drawn with the following value:

PR0 0-3 "points"
PR1 4- 15 points
PR2 16-63
PR3 64-255
PR4 256-1023
PR5 1024-4095
PR6 4096-16383
PR7 16384-65535
PR8 65536-262143
PR9 262144-1048575
PR10 1048576 or more "points"

where "point" is some absolute value that is calculated as far as link importance.

So, if you look above, a high PR4 is almost as powerful as a low PR5 in terms of link importance being transferred to you. And a high PR5 is much, much stronger than a low PR4 (but if the PR5 has 100 links on it, I'd still prefer a link from a PR4 that has no other links, regardless).

PageRank is transferred from a sending page (outbound link) to a receiving page (inbound link), but according to the paper I linked you to above with the original formula, not all of the PageRank is transferred. There is a "damping factor", in the paper above it is .85 (that could have changed from then to now), which means that only 85% of the PageRank is transferred (divided equally amongst the outbound links). So, if your PR4 page has an absolute value of 500 points, it transfers 85% of its 500 points, which is 425 points. If your page is the only one it is linking to, you get all 425 points. If you get just 3 similar PR4 pages to link to you (and nobody else), your page will become a PR5 just from those links (if the logarithm used is 4). If the PR4 was linking to 10 pages, you would only get 42.5 "points" from it, so it would take you many more incoming links to become a PR4 yourself, let alone a PR5. Lesson: choose your link partners wisely.

It's also important to know that the sending page does not lose its PageRank when it links out, so you shouldn't be greedy about keeping your pages isolated from the world. If you don't link to another page you're just throwing your voting power away, so at the very least you need to link to one or more of the pages on your own site to give them some additional PageRank points.

I highly recommend that you download the Google toolbar and install it on your browser so that you know the PR value of the pages that you are interested in exchanging links with, as well as your own PR. You can get the Google toolbar here.

That's all for today, I urge you to read the article linked at the beginning of this post, get the toolbar, and reread this post once or twice if you found it a bit overwhelming. An understanding of these concepts is absolutely essential to becoming a successful search engine optimizer.

What factors most influence search engine ranking?

When I talk about search engine ranking, and how to influence or predict it, I am going by the knowledge gained over time from reading the opinions of so-called "experts", as well as noticing the cause and effect of the web pages on my sites. Obviously any discussion of what characteristics of a web page is looked upon favorably by a specific search engine is often only an educated guess.

Considering the above, and considering the fact that search engine algorithms change frequently, I recommend that you construct your web pages to be primarily useful for human visitors first, and then additionally use common sense in determining structure that would logically be looked upon favorably by the search engines.

With that in mind, it seems that search engine ranking can be influenced by three primary things:

1. on-page content (over which you have complete control)

2. incoming links from external pages (over which you have partial control)

3. off-page content (over which you have little control)

ON PAGE CONTENT:
Again, put the words on the page so that your visitors enjoy the experience of visiting your site, that should be your primary goal.

But then again, if your page isn't found, of what value is an enjoyable page? So therefore ....

The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to ensure that the search engines understand what your web site and pages are all about, and to appreciate the value available to someone searching for the topic you've written about.

Considering the fact that a spider can only read text, and a search engine algorithm basically can only do mathematical calculations on the text the spider has found, sometimes they need some help in understanding your page.

Since your page is normally focused on a primary keyword phrase, and perhaps 1-4 secondary keywords, make sure they understand what you're talking about. Some ways you can do that with on-page content are:

1. the right most part of your URL can and should contain the primary keyword phrase that your page is focused on. If your page is about custom made widgets, there is no reason that the page cannot be named http://www.domain-name.com/custom-made-widgets.html, is there?

2. limit each page's content to a primary keyword phrase, 1-4 secondary keyword phrases, and close variants (such as singular or plural versions of the keyword, the word ending in -ing, etc.).

3. the meta description tag should be used to describe what your page is about. Write it for human consumption because it will often display in the search result, which will give the searcher the ability to decide whether to click on the link or not.

4. meta keywords are not commonly used anymore, but can be useful for keyword variations and misspellings. You don't want to put misspelled words on your page, but you do want to pick up the occasional surfer who searches for the misspelled phrase. You can also include synonyms in your meta keyword list, it might help a bit for some search engines.

5. the page title is one of the most important parts of SEO, and probably the most crucial components of on-page content that can make or break your SEO efforts.

The title tag should include the primary keyword phrase at the very left and read well for human consumption. It can also include secondary keywords if they can be inserted in the title without affecting readability.

6. the heading tags, H1, H2, H3, etc. can help the spider understand the primary and secondary topics you're talking about. Wrap a single main heading containing your primary keyword phrase between title and /title tags, and the secondary keywords can be between H2 tags (you can have multiple H2 and H3 sets, but should only have a single H1.

PERSONAL EXAMPLE:
In looking at a page of one of my sites that is targeting the keyphrase "Harley jacket", at the moment I'm ranked #6 of 299,000. I've done the correct on page tasks, which is to put "Harley jacket" in the title tag, meta description tag, meta keyword tag, H1 heading tag, and on my page a few times. I also link to this page from other related pages on my site (pages that are optimized for other Harley items).

In spot #18 (2nd page) is another page that also done the obvious, but beats my page rank (I currently show a PR0 on the Google toolbar, with no backlinks. Not good but more on that later). The #18 page has a PR4 with 5 backlinks. It would seem that they should rank ahead of my page, since they beat me in the off page area.

One thing I see is in my title I include the phrase "Harley jacket". On their page (use the view source on your browser to see what their HTML looks like) they say "leather jacket with Harley-Davidson patches", not quite as targeted to the phrase I'm searching. Of course they rise to the top when someone searches for "leather jacket with harley patches" and do better than I do when someone types "Harley Davidson jacket", since I don't have Davidson in my page at all.

Hmmm, something to look at, I'd say, glad I noticed that.

The point is, you can still do well before reaching a good PR and a good number of inbound links. The thing is, PR is a bit evasive. You can only see the PR that the Google toolbar reports, which isn't updated as often as pages are indexed. But I guarantee, Google has record of a real PR value for my page, and the fact that I do have inbound backlinks, even though they don't all show (the competition probably has more than the 5 Google reports also, for that matter).

My page is relatively new, so the external manifestation of those numbers aren't shown yet on the toolbar. I suspect my real PR on that page is definitely more than PR0, but probably is less than PR4, though, so the competing page still beats me in off-page content, I beat it for on-page "Harley jackets", it beats me for "Harley Davidson jacket" (at least until I change my page to include that word).

As you can perhaps see, SEO is an acquirable skill which you can learn and be successful at if you take the time, and use common sense. Or you can pay someone big bucks to do it for you. If you only care about getting a high ranking for a few phrases, that's one thing. But if you have thousands of pages, each targeting a different keyword phrase, you need to get the key concepts ingrained in your mind before you start writing content. Otherwise you're simply wasting your time and future income.

This discussion also points out the super importance of determining what keywords you want to do well for, for a given page. When I wrote the page, I thought I was wanting to do well for Harley jackets, and I am. Now that I check out the results and the competition, I see that they want to do well for Harley Davidson jacket, and after using one of my keyword research tools, I find out that searchers look more frequently for Harley Davidson jacket than they look for Harley jacket, so I'll have to make a change, won't I? SEO can be an unending challenge. Hopefully the change I make won't ruin my Harley jacket ranking at the same time as it improves my Harley Davidson jacket result.

In future discussions we'll talk more about anchor text (which is off page content), getting inbound links, and we'll get more in-depth about some on-page content we didn't fully cover today.

See you soon!

How to get your site found by the search engines

Normally a web page / web site is found by the act of a search engine crawler following a link from another page that's currently listed in the search engine index. A crawler (or spider) is a virtual robot that crawls along, following links from one page to the next, archiving those pages into a search engine database, to be later analyzed for the purpose of ranking and indexing.

In the beginning of time for a crawler, the beginning point is suspected to be either the DMOZ and/or Yahoo directories, so if you can get listed in one or both of those directories, it is highly beneficial.

Your first goal in search engine optimization (SEO) is simply to make sure your new pages or new site is linked to another page that is already indexed by the major search engines. Once a page is indexed, it is revisited by the crawler or spider occasionally to see if anything is new.

The frequency of visits is determined mostly by the importance of the site and how often it changes content. Some sites are crawled monthly, some daily or even more frequently. If new pages you produce are linked from a page that is crawled daily, it will be found and subsequently indexed much quicker than if it were linked from a less important page.

This is one reason why blogs and RSS feeds are becoming so important and why Internet experts are becoming so excited about them. A blog by definition is something that is updated (actively added to) frequently, and the search engines absolutely love that. Of course bloggers that blog infrequently don't reap those benefits because the crawlers become used to the update frequency after a while.

In a prior post I mentioned that I could get Yahoo to notice a new blog entry very quickly (within minutes of uploading it sometimes), and pages linked from those posts will be crawled soon thereafter.

RSS feeds are loosely related to blogs, because it is a mechanism whereby a page is constructed that point to multiple blog entries (or sometimes just multiple related pages on a site). If you have an RSS feed on your site, other sites have the opportunity to syndicate your feed to interested parties. The act of syndication benefits both parties, a subject for another post one day.

It is much easier at this point in time (late 2004) to get quickly listed in blog directories than it is to get listed in normal web directories. Therefore, one way to get a newly constructed web site indexed relatively is to put up a blog on the site, get the blog listed in the blog directories, link the home page of your main site to the blog, and soon enough the crawler will find its way to your entire site.

Now you have an idea how to get a new page found by the spiders. On my next post, I'll discuss what factors influence how favorably your web pages are ranked by the search engines. See you then.

Search Engine Optimization - getting to page 1

If you publish a web site, your primary goal is probably the same as mine. That is to get traffic to visit your pages. Not just any traffic, but targeted traffic that is interested in your topic.

A lot has been written by others (and I'll throw a few paragraphs into the mix occasionally also) , and a lot of money has been spent on PPC (pay per click) advertising. It's true that immediate traffic can be sent to a site with PPC ... at a cost.

It's also true that PPC can determine if the searching public wants a particular product to begin with, i.e. if they won't click through your PPC ad to view your page, what does it matter if the page is high quality to begin with? In other words, if a tree grows in the forest, and nobody sees it, is it really beautiful? Or whatever.

PPC can help you bridge the gap between the day when a site goes live and the day when free traffic arrives.

BUT ... your goal should always be 2 things:

1. build a site full of pages that converts visitors to customers. A customer might be someone who makes a purchase. Or a customer might be someone who signs up to receive your newsletter if that's what you want to accomplish. Or a customer might be someone who subscribes to your RSS feed, like this one. A customer doesn't need to be someone who gives you money, they might be someone who gives you their time and their trust.

2. build pages that the search engines recognize as valuable enough to award good rankings, so that when a searcher is searching for what you have, they find YOU!

SEO (search engine optimization) is a professional skill which attempts to place your web pages in a position where a searcher will find you. In must cases web pages that are in search result page 3 or higher (assuming 10 results per page) are rarely found for a search term. For valuable phrases, placing on the first page of search results of major search engines (specifically Google, Yahoo, and soon MSN) is pure gold.

Competition is intense for those top 10 positions and SEO consultants who can deliver the results are well paid. Rightly so.

However most SEO work for small businesses on a budget can well be performed competently by the author of the web page if he or she keeps a few core essentials in mind.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I'll be posting the core essentials that I've found to be effective for me in this blog spot. I hope you come back tomorrow when we'll get started in earnest.

New Google tool could make your life much easier!

Google Suggest Beta

I heard about this little gem the other day, but didn't have time to report on it, or play with it as much as I would have liked to. As the link above suggests, it's a beta version (in other words not officially released, but available to play with and give feedback on).

Google Suggest is pretty much what the name implies, if you consider that "Google" is as much a verb now as a proper name, though I'm sure the big G doesn't want that to happen. When somebody asks me how to find something on the web, I typically tell them to Google the phrase, and often as not they know what I mean.

Now Googling became much easier. When using the Google Suggest page, as you type, you get suggestions about how to finish your query. For example, start typing:

buy a (and it prompts you with the first 10 obvious things you could want, starting (for me) with buy and sell, buy a car, buy a star, etc.). It even tells you how many results you can find for each of those phrases. As you type further, it will modify the suggestions as you type. You can see what other people are typically asking for, and very importantly you can avoid spelling mistakes.

What's truly amazing to me is how quickly Google can make 10 suggestions and tell you how many matching pages there are for each.

I really like this new Google feature, but I'm not sure how beneficial it will be for Internet marketers. Many have become successful by creating Google AdWords campaigns or web pages optimized for hundreds and thousands of different variations of common search terms, even for phrases containing spelling errors. Google Suggest might just put one huge monkey wrench into those campaigns.

The other thing that could happen is it could inhibit creative searches, or steal your train of thought. You're typing along wanting to search for buy a humidifier, and the first thing that pops up as you type is "buy a hummer". I can see that as being very distracting. But that's me.

Play with the tool, I'm bookmarking it myself, it could be a lot of fun to play with on a slow day.

Google AdSense URL Channels - awesome!

I received an email yesterday that made me throw up my hands in relief. Google has given publishers that use AdSense what I consider to be an early Christmas present with an awesome new feature called URL channels.

Previously you could (sort of) track performance of different sites, pages, colors, whatever you wanted, by using channels. The channel code was embedded into the javascript that is pasted into your web page, and you could get reports of performance and earnings by channel.

Channels were a hassle, mainly because of the fact that you had to decide in advance what breakdowns you wanted reports on, and if you changed your mind you had to go back to the document, change the pages, and upload fresh copies.

Now, all you have to do is tell Google what you want reports on. You can get reporting by domain, by sub-directory within a domain, or by page. Anything you want unless you want more than 60 different breakdowns, because 60 is the maximum (including any channels you're currently using).

The big excitement is that you don't have to paste code into your pages, it's all done automatically.

Now I'll be able to tell which domains or pages are getting the most clicks, and most importantly the highest earnings per click, and react accordingly. Unfortunately, as with the prior channel setup, reporting is delayed by two days, so as of now I haven't seen any statistics since the feature was only announced yesterday. Hopefully the 2-day delay will be something that Google looks at in the future, but for now, this is absolutely wonderful, and could be a real money maker or money saver.

Once I can give some feedback about how I'm able to maximize my earnings because of the new URL channels, I'll be sure to post more information.

Secrets, secrets, everywhere ... now, really?

Every time you turn around, a new eBook, eCourse, or seminar is coming out purporting to teach you previously untold secrets. All you need to do is pay your money, listen up, and you'll know something never before told, something that all the marketers in the world are begging the "guru" to keep to himself.

Traffic secrets. eBay secrets. Search engine secrets. AdWords secrets. Marketing secrets. Success secrets. Hogwash!

I've read a lot of the eBooks, studied the web pages, listened to the seminars, and none of the "secrets" are truly secrets.

Now, I'm not saying that the information isn't valuable, and some of it is even ingenious and new to me, all of it is new to somebody, but a secret? I don't think so.

My advice to you is to take all the sales pages you're asked to read with the proverbial grain of salt. Especially the long ones. The reason the sales pages are so long is that their aim is to numb you to the point where your eyes glaze over and you finally hit that "order now" button that's on that page about 72 times. They figure the longer you read, the better chance there is that you'll completely wear down.

Of course there is always a guarantee. 60 days, 90 days, 1 year, lifetime, whatever it is, once they have your money, odds are that 90% of the people that make a purchase either don't read or listen to more than 20% of the eBook or course, and therefore won't feel good about asking for their money back.

My advice to you today is to stop buying eBooks and seminars just for the thrill of learning a secret. Secrets aren't marketed to the mass public.

There are a lot of quality courses out there that teach you something that you don't yet know, that can truly help you become more proficient in whatever it is you're looking to learn. Look for the missing pieces of knowledge that can help you succeed, and seek out a good course about that subject. Invest in your education. I have. It works.

My personal "secret" to whatever success I've attained is that the more I learn, the more I earn. The harder I work, the luckier I get. But I'll bet you're heard that before, haven't you?

Until next time, I wish you nothing but the best.

Learn how to find a profitable niche market for yourself!

I'm a huge fan of webinars. There, the secret is out.

Over the past few years, I've gotten email invites to tons of seminars on the Internet Marketing topic. Sorry to say I haven't gone to any yet, but will probably bite the bullet in 2005. The reason I've stayed away is two-fold. One, the cost. Two, the time away from my daily duties.

The cost can be upwards of several thousand dollars, when you take into consideration the seminar fee, airfare, hotel charges, meals, and all the rest. Sure, it's an investment in your education, but it's hard to justify for someone struggling to get started. Most attendees say an offline seminar was the single biggest thing that jump started their online marketing career, due to the contacts made there more so than the subject matter. But still, some people have budget concerns.

In my case, the time away is the critical factor. It's tough enough getting away for a few day breakation, considering emails pile up (about 800 a day on average I've found), and since we have real merchandise that we ship from our warehouse, customers expect us to physically process, pack, and ship their wares on a timely basis, and our staff is small and lean, so much so that there are things than don't get done when I'm away.

The next type of seminar is the teleseminar. This is where you phone into a central line and get online with one or more "experts" in a particular subject, hear what they have to say, and perhaps fight with the other several dozen people on the same line to ask a question of the expert(s). That's good, but you have to make sure you're available at the time of the call for 1-2 hours normally. Plus, you have to pay long distance charges for 90 minutes or more to listen in.

The best deal of all is the webinar. A webinar is where the seminar is streamed from the host's web site, and all you have to do is log on with the user name and password assigned to you, no need to phone in. More and more seminar hosts are making this format available, but not nearly enough. The first person that I found to do it right was Jason Potash, and he always does a bang up job. I've signed up for a few of the talks he's hosted and was never disappointed.

Some webinars and teleseminars are free, some are tuition based (you pay for them). The ones that are free I've found are generally a wash. You give up a couple hours of your time, and the speaker teases you by giving you some good information, but not enough to prevent you from needing to buy his eBook or course. It's a sales pitch, sometimes thinly disguised, but a sales pitch all the same. I hate generalizing, so I'll admit that I'm not certain that all free seminars are sales pitches, but why else would they be free? Think about it.

Most of the tuition based webinars are real meat and potatoes types of courses, and this is where I get back to Jason Potash's offerings. One of the best was a webinar he had about Google AdWords with Perry Marshall and another gentleman a few months ago. It was a classic case of overdelivery, scheduled, if I remember right, for 90 minutes on 2 separate days, and I think both days ran over 2 hours each. The subject matter was something I was, and still am, interested in knowing as much about as possible, and the speakers weren't there to waste your time selling anything, because the attendees had bought the training to begin with. It was excellent, and I've listened to the recordings of the calls more than once.

Next week (December 7th and 9th) if you're reading this soon after I typed it, Jason's offering another webiner that I for one don't want to miss. You see, the hardest thing about Internet Marketing is finding a profitable niche market to spend your time developing content for. Pick the wrong one and you've wasted your time, pick the right one and you have a long term gold mine that just keeps giving and giving money every month.

The topic of the webinar is "How To Sniff Out And Dominate Ultra-Lucrative Niche Markets And Exploit Them For Massive Profits!"

The title says it all, if you want to learn more about the experts Jason is interviewing, and about the webinar itself, click on the link above.

Think about niche marketing this way. If you pick a dud subject, you might waste a month of your time developing a site nobody is interested in, or one that's too competitive to get you enough traffic to do well. If instead you picked a different topic, and that site were to earn you a typical $500 a month, then you've lost $6000 a year by picking the wrong topic. Can you afford to risk that $6000?

If you're reading this after December 7th, or even if you're busy somewhere else December 7th or 9th, not to worry. He has an option where you can just sign up for the downloadable MP3 recording of the calls and listen any time you want.

I don't know about you, but I'm personally going to listen to this call. Maybe I'll "see" you there also.