I think the reason that some people do well financially on the internet while other people do not (and some people don’t even choose to play) is the paradigm. The Internet is different from anything that has ever happened before. Some people can wrap their mind around it, others cannot.
The first time I really “got” what was going on was at a Yanik Silver Underground Workshop. I missed the first one but I was at Underground II. It really dawned on me what was going on. I missed the second day of the three-day blowout because I had a bad headache. I had to get the DVD to catch up. That’s because what I realized that day made my head short-circuit.
What makes the Internet unique is that it’s like a giant global shopping mall … with one exception. You can’t get in unless you tell the Internet what you want. You can go to a brick-and-mortar shopping center and just idly stroll in and out of stores at random. You can’t do that on the web. You have to give up some clues. You either have to name your site (“Take me to Amazon!”) or you have to tell it what you want (“How many degrees Fahrenheit is 20 C?” or “Cheap running shoes” or “Free Wordpress themes”).
Those mysterious passwords you utter–or rather click into the browser–are called keywords. It’s a field worth studying. The whole Internet machinery works on them.
The ideal fit is when a person types in his keyword and that keyword is one prominent on your website. Match! You are more likely to be picked up by the search engine, which tries to make the most likely matches. (However, search engine mechanics are another topic for a later day. It’s not quite as simple as I’m making it sound.)
If you place a Google ad (those ads that run down the right-hand column on Google), your ad is triggered by keywords. Let’s say I’m selling a correspondence course in tango lessons. I take out my Google ad and ask to bid on the keyword “tango.” If you type in “tango,” I enter the bidding war with the other ads that are bidding on that keyword. Some keywords are hot (and expensive) some are very cheap. I bet the longer keyword (“correspondence tango lessons”) is pennies.
By the way, for all you grammarians out there, keyword appears to be singular even when the keyword in question is many words long or even a whole sentence. (Hey, don’t get mad at me. I don’t make the rules, I just observe usage patterns.)
That much seems pretty easy. But the idea is to find the keywords of people who are interested in doing what you want them to do. Coming back to the example, I don’t want people who just want to know about the tango or listen to tango music. I want people who want to buy … and buy tango lessons … and not in a dance studio but in a correspondence course. Figuring out what that imaginary “buyer” might type in as a keyword is the art of keywordsmithing.
