I am overwhelmed by the possibilities of internet marketing. In fact, it is almost debilitating. I have been at this for ten years now, and am addicted to it. My income has not climbed to the levels that the gurus claim they could be, not even near. It’s a living though, and it is work. In spite of many of my sites being sort of on autopilot I work almost everyday on existing and new sites.

With all the possibilities, all the possible niches, techniques, guru suggestions – what to choose? What to tackle next? One cannot try everything, but yet the lure of a winning internet project is so strong that it’s almost possible to resist. So we end up spending lots of time seeking “the” solution. What I have found though, is in this business it is definitely the 80/20 rule. 20% of my projects make 80% of the income.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I know in advance what those 20% were? So we could just skip the other 80%. In my case in order to grow income I think I have to get better at evaluating existing sites and new projects.

Well, you can’t. I have sites I got so exited about years ago, spent endless hours making them just “so” – doing all the right SEO/link building things. And nothing. Then I have other sites I slapped together in an afternoon and they are doing well. Frustrating. How can we know in advance? One thing is that we need to be better at cynically analyzing the potential of the project. Remove emotions from the process. We all get very emotional about new and exiting projects. A clever domain name takes on its own life. Like a baby. So we nurture and care for our sites. That’s why we do this (and the money). For me it is the chase. The need to beat others, beat the system. I think we need to treat it with more business savvy.

I have spent a bit of time back-analyzing existing project. (During that process I also cleaned up old sites that now could be a risk as far as AdSense is concerned.) What I found was that there are still – to this day – two basic components to a site’s success. Keywords and inbound links. Aside from what we all know – content and a clean site it still boils down to choosing keywords and getting links. I have sites in niches I thought would be “under the radar”. Nothing. Yet I compete well in much stronger niches. Go figure.

So to analyze a potential niche I start with the keywords. I am looking for highly searched and low search engine results of course. I am also looking for keywords that might not show up in keyword analysis systems… new key phrases. If you manage to capture some of those – great. For example, ‘retirement entrepreneurs’ is nowhere to be seen in Keyword Elite or WordTracker. The word ‘retirement’ of course is all over the place. So I went and got the .com for that term. Set up a blog, linked into it from some other sites and wrote some content. Today I looked at the server stats, and were pleasantly surprised to see several searches for ‘retirement entrepreneur’ getting to my site.

The take-away here is simply; be creative, use obvious keywords but also include some combinations that are not so obvious. You never know!

Author Bio: Ingvar is getting close to “the golden age”. He writes about entrepreneurship after retirement. www.retiremententrepreneurs.com

Category: Marketing
Keywords: internet marketing in retirement,successful internet marketing programs