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Free Online Marketing Research Tools

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Yes, You Really Can Find Some Excellent Free Market Research Tools Online

Winning in Internet marketing is something that thousands try each year. And yet, most of them give up way too early - creating their own failure before really giving themselves a chance to fail. (Self-sabotage, anyone?)

In fact, becoming a successful online marketer is not merely the domain of tech geeks, M.B.A.s, marketing geniuses, or people willing to work 100 hours per week while never seeing the light of day.

The fact is, there are three cornerstones to winning in the world of web marketing, Adsense marketing, and affiliate marketing:

1. keep trying and testing new techniques
2. learn how to do good online research
3. keep building on your own past success

It's basically that simple. The good news is that there is really such thing as a learning curve in online marketing. No matter how many courses you have purchased, blogs you have read, or successful online marketers you have had coffee with, the reality is that you have to roll up your sleeves and give it a "go" for yourself. Day in and day out.

This lens helps you in particular with #2 above: doing good online research. In particular, the lens explores free tools and techniques that you can apply to your own online marketing efforts today.

So, let's get started!

Here's the Skinny on Internet Marketing Research

Research is KingIn the traditional world of brick-and-mortar stores, market research is generally concerned with answering these six questions:

1. Product: What should we sell and what features should it have?
2. Targeting: To whom should we sell it?
3. Positioning: What benefits shall we say it offers to our customers?
4. Pricing: How much should we charge for it?
5. Distribution: Where should we sell it/how should we deliver it to them?
6. Promotion: How can we get their attention?

Now, in many ways Internet marketing is just an extension of traditional marketing. However, it is unique in two ways:

a. Internet marketing in some ways is a subset of traditional marketing; often, the problems that marketers focus on in terms of Internet marketing are concerned more with Targeting and Promotion and less with product, Pricing, Positioning and Distribution. (Of course, even the last four items can and do come into play with Internet marketing, but they are less-often dealt with).

b. Internet marketing deals with a different set of challenges than does traditional marketing. These challenges have to do with the fact that the storefront is virtual, meaning it does not have a fixed geographical location.

The central challenge, therefore, of Internet marketers (and therefore of Internet market researchers) is: how do we get the the right prospects to our websites, as cheaply as possible? And, once they are there, how do we get them to buy our product or service?

In a sense, all real Internet marketing research problems boil down to answering those two questions.

Get a Head Start in Internet Marketing

Great Stuff on Amazon

Prefer studying your marketing the old school way? These selections from Amazon can help.
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5 FREE Online Marketing Tools

Everybody likes FREE. If you are like most people getting started in Internet marketing, you are probably trying to turn a profit without spending a lot up front. The following 5 tools are all excellent places to begin.

Once you get started and start bringing in the sales (due to all of your excellent research), you can of course start investing in the "next level" of great tools.
  1. Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool: To build online content that people actually care about AND have a good chance of finding when they do a search, you will need to do your keyword research. This one from Google is a great way to get started in keyword research. And, it's totally free! Use it to find out how many searches the target keywords you enter get (on average) each day or month: Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool.
  2. Your Favorite Search Engine: Next, you will need to find out just how much competition each of your keywords faces in the marketplace. To do this, your favorite trusty-old search engine like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing are all excellent choices. Just run a search using quotation marks (i.e., an exact search) and see how many search results come up. If there are fewer than about 5,000 to 10,000 results, your content has a good chance of surfacing on Page One.
  3. KeywordDensity.com: Keyword density just reviews to how "densely packed" a given web page is with your target keyword. It is expressed as a percentage from 0% to 100% and can apply to both visible text and hidden "meta tag" data. To use this one, just enter the URL of the target page, along with the keyword you are checking for: KeywordDensity.com.

    Note: some hot-shot Internet marketers downplay the importance of keyword density. But, the bottom line is that search engines love it when the target keywords someone is searching for show up frequently on a given web page. Better density (usually between 3-5%) will help with that page's rankings.
  4. SEO Book: Here is a great tool from SEO Book that you can install into your browser. When you launch it, you can run a rankings report for individual keywords or a list of keywords for a given site. Very handy for tracking your natural search campaign's progress: SEO Book.
  5. Alexa: Want to find out how much traffic your competitors' sites are getting, relative to your own? How about learning how many banklinks their sites have pointed to them from other sites (a great sign of popularity)? You can accomplish both with Alexa. Find out more here: Alexa.com.

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Everett is a lover of all things travel, outdoors, and adventure. When he's not working as a freelance writer, he's traveling around the U.S. and beyo... more »

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