Recently I found myself sitting in a lecture hall with a collection of much younger students, I am doing a course on web development as I have been considering a new career designing webpages, and the lecturer started trying to establish our relative ages. The purpose of this exercise was to establish how many in the audience had known a time before the arrival of the internet. You see she, the lecturer, was making the point that the way we all do research has altered a lot since the arrival of the internet age.
Time was that when you wanted to research certain career opportunities like starting a new business you would need to conduct extensive market research, maybe a lot of surveys of your possible customer base all of which would take a lot of time. But by using a few of the many tools available online this can now be done instantly or at least a lot more quickly. You can find out if your new career ideas have any mileage in hours rather than weeks or even months.
The usual way of doing this is by using a keyword analysis tool. There are a wide variety available to you many are free and others fairly expensive. The sort of tool you eventually choose to use depends on what sort of business you have in mind and how much time and money you can spend on this venture. There are also many businesses already on the internet who will do all this work for you and give you a very specific report regarding your potential targeted market. To begin this process you need to consider the sort of words and phrases your possible clients will use to find you on the internet, then input these into your chosen keyword tool. Doubtlessly the one that many people know of and use first is the Google AdWords keyword tool, you can find it here (https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal). Although it is mainly aimed at those who are considering a Google AdWords campaign it is simple to use and the results you get are easy to follow. If you would prefer to use a software package for your keyword analysis WEB CEO www.webceo.com has both a free and paid for version that is also fairly simple to get the hang of and they also have training available.
So what though do these tools tell you about the validity of your potential new career idea? Well let’s say you want to sell a particular product online you put a keyword or phrase into the tool and see how many searches per month are currently being made. If not many people are searching for your product then you know that it’s not likely to sell in great quantities. Another thing you can check for is the amount of competition you are likely to up against. This too is very important when considering your potential career opportunities as you may have a wonderful product that many people are seeking for but are entering a market that is already saturated. Working this out is called the keyword effectiveness index or KEI and this is a formula invented by search engine specialist Sumantra Roy and a lot of keyword tools now utilise this method to produce results for you.
So as you can see by using the numerous web tools available you can easily and quickly see whether any potential web career ideas you have are worth pursuing, but remember this is just the start your prospects of success will still come down to your talent to co-ordinate all the elements of an online business.
