A common belief among people is that in order to create a successful online business, affiliate marketers need to train or target thousands of keywords. While this was true in the past, it has no substance today. In the modern internet environment, long-tail keywords lead the way to profitable niches.

This belief that you need thousands of related keywords prevents marketers, sometimes both new and seasoned, from getting down to business. They spend an inordinate amount of time researching and examining countless keywords and keyword variations. They are looking for the “brass ring”. The simple truth is that you can look too much. Don’t look for that perfect catch. Find a suitable niche and get your feet wet. You will most likely find a better niche with long tail keywords

As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, there was a time when more was better. He simply identified as many keywords as he could and did his best to corral them onto his site. It worked like that and it was a simpler time. Back when the network was young, you would populate your metadata with them and it would lead to higher rankings and of course traffic.

This worked in the early years of this decade, but the heyday of easy money falling from the sky (or in this case, Google AdWords) is over. We need to adjust to the fact that the algorithms Google uses have been greatly refined since then.

The internet landscape has changed and in order to survive and then profit from the internet and affiliate marketing we have had to change with it and also become more sophisticated in our methods. The term “targeted” is not only representative of the type of traffic you want today, but also refers to your niche research and how you cultivate the right TARGETED keywords.

The old strategy of loading your site with keywords and seeing what kind of traffic they generated, sort of a wait and see approach, doesn’t stand up to a sentence of success in today’s modern internet marketplace. Just as soccer teams look for weaknesses and exploit them with a good play, marketers are always looking for advantages in the Internet marketplace. And like the defense, Google seeks to counter the game with changes to its operating policies and by introducing new or adapted scoring systems. They are wise to us, but we are pretty smart too!

What will do the job today is the long tail keyword. It is a series of strung words that form a search, a thought or concept. A simple keyword is “Health”. If you ran this keyword, you would find that a broad match would return over a BILLION pages. But if you were to run “Healthcare in the Modern Age,” you’ve isolated a much narrower niche that returns far fewer pages. This is a long-tail keyword and is usually expressed as a minimum of 2 and a maximum of ten words.

Long-tail keywords allow you to dominate your niche. Yes, they have fewer searches and therefore fewer people searching, but these are hungry, motivated sellers zeroing in on exactly what they want. And you as a marketer need to also focus on the right keywords so that you can be there to meet the needs of your customers and then make sale after sale because now you control your niche.

So this is the nature of the market today: long-tail keywords focused on the specific need of a niche market that you found and exploited. By using long-tail keywords, you can literally play in the backyard of the “big industry dogs” because from their point of view, your market is meaningless to them; Sometimes they don’t really realize the potential that we as internet and affiliate marketers can tap into right under their collective noses.

The days of using a collection of keywords placed, let’s face it, quite randomly on a website and getting an easy ranking and therefore traffic, ARE GONE. We now live and work in a much more sophisticated Internet marketplace that demands flexibility and focus. So get out there! I identify your long tail keywords, dominate and control your niche and make mountains of cash!