This is day 24 of my 30 day challenge to bring new visitors to this website and demonstrate that blogging can be a inexpensive and profitable business to start.

My three marketing tasks for the day were…

1. Keyword Research

I was checking up on my search engine rankings today and I noticed for the keyword “home based business” I am now #14 in Google. Just two days ago I was #15. I’m moving up! Getting on the first page (top ten) will mean a big traffic increase.

Two important things I discovered were that:

• People don’t search for what you think they search for
• It’s best to target less competitive keywords when first starting out

Just to give you an example, when I was brainstorming what keywords to target for this site, I came up with some like “entrepreneurship” or “start a business”. Well it turns out that apparently very few people search for these terms.

If you check out the chart, it shows an estimate of how many clicks per day you’ll get from being on the first page of Google for various keywords (I used WordTracker and Overture to come up with these results). As you can see, keywords like “start a business” are dwarfed by keywords like “home business”.

I never would have guessed this. The lesson here is spend the time to research your keywords.

So just because a keyword gets lots of clicks, does it mean you should target it and try to get your page on Google for that keyword? No.

Sometimes it’s unrealistic to target the most popular keywords when you are first starting out. This is why I took some of the easier targets like “start home business” (currently #8 in Google) and “how to start a business” (currently #19 in Google).

Getting to #14 for “home based business” is a huge accomplishment because that is a highly competitive keyword with tons of searches. It is already bringing in more traffic than “start home business” where I’m on the first page.

Anyway, what I realized is that I should make a push to move up in the rankings for “home based business” because I’m quite close already. This means trying to incoming links with that in the anchor text and making out going links with that in the anchor text.

2. Submitted 14 more link requests through LinkMachine

I also changed the settings so that my anchor text would include “home based business” more often.

I’m making sure to only swap links with relevant sites as well (I’ve turned down a bunch) because I don’t want to get flagged by Google.

3. Submitted Two More Articles To ArticleMarketer

So far my two most popular articles (as tracked by Google Analytics) were about Power Napping - How To Fall Asleep Anywhere and How To Design The Perfect Nap.

Once again, I made the anchor text of the byline include the keyword “home based business”.

Since they were popular, I decided to give them a wider distribution through Article Marketer. Maybe they will go viral!

Discussion question: what keywords related to your niche do you think would be the most popular? Make a guess and then visit Overture for a minute and see if you are correct. Let us know the results in the comments.

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