Today, I taught another course at the Pleasant Hill Adult Education center.  I teach courses like this often and always enjoy meeting the people who register for the courses I offer.  Today’s program was entitled “Modern Marketing in Action” and we took a broad top-level look at some of the exciting marketing options in our increasingly internet-driven world.  My group was full of entrepreneurs trying to grow their respective businesses.

I always spend a good deal of time discussing the differences between yesterday’s “interruption marketing” environment (a phrase coined by Seth Godin) and today’s “permission marketing” alternative.  In particular, I always like to point out how differently the young people view the internet when compared with older people.  Their respective perspectives are near opposite.  But after that, we looked at some of the tools available on today’s internet and there was one they really got excited about.

Many of you may know about the publicly accessible Google keyword tool on the Adwords platform.  If you’re not, you need only click on Resources above and then Useful Links and Keyword Research Tools to find it (or you can just click here).  On that platform, you can enter any keyword you’re interested in and the platform will spit out a long list of related keywords along with the PPC competition and the average search volume for each keyword.  This is an incredibly powerful utility we’re all well advised to take advantage of.

Before I explain the best way to use this platform, let me first explain how it functions.  When you enter a keyword into the input field, Google looks into its database to see what other words people used when searching for the keywords you entered.  In other words, the output is entirely dynamic and determined by the millions of people who use Google every day.  The words they use in their search queries give Google a ready supply of words related to the ones you’re interested in.

Anyway, once you have the output, you can sort the results by the PPC competition or the average search volume.  If you think about it, sorting the results by the average search volume tells you precisely what Google users are looking for most often.  For example, you can put “products” in and see that after “office products”, there are 5 or 6 keyword phrases that all have to do with skin care and beauty supplies – shows you what people are looking for.  Likewise, if you put “services” in, you’ll see that a lot of the searches have to do with dating services, phone services and internet services.  Lastly, if you put “free” (one of the most heavily searched terms on the internet) in, you’ll see that the top results are for free games and free downloads.

For an entrepreneur, this is an incredibly powerful utility.  You can simply put your keywords into the Google tool and immediately find out precisely what your audience is searching for.  Then, armed with that information, you can build out your website with sections that cater specifically to that subject.  Not only will that cater to those who stumble upon your website but it will likely increase the number of people find your site through the search engines.

Never before have we had such access.  Never before have we had a platform where you can immediately see what your audience is looking for.  And if you’re looking to refine your business and grow your revenue, I highly recommend looking here first.  Let your audience tell you where to go and then build exactly what it is that they’re looking for.  It saves time.  It saves money.

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