If you want to make money online, you may wonder what you should sell and who you should sell it to.

The first step of any plan to make money online should always be to check for what people are buying. It’s very difficult to create markets and make any money, it’s a lot easier to pick a market that already has a flood of buyers and position your offer in front of them.

The cool thing about online marketing is that you don’t have to guess, there’s a sure-fire way to find out.

And this technique works as a way to identify market demand even if you are not selling anything online too . . .

Are you familiar with Google AdWords?  These are those ads you see at the top of a page in a Google search and also down the right side. All those listings are paid ads.

The other search engines do the same thing and that’s how they make their billions.

So, if you could find out what the advertisers pay for a click on their ad and also find out how much traffic that keyword had, can you see how that might be useful to help you make money online?

Well, you can.

There are plenty of places to find this info, just type something like “Most Expensive Google AdWords Keywords” into Google. Here’s the best one I found when doing that:

Here’s what the column headings mean:

• “Keyword” is the word the advertiser is paying to get their ad seen on.
• “Search Volume is the number of searches per month in the US
• “Average CPC” means the average price an advertiser is paying per CLICK on their ad
• “Category” is the general category that keyword falls in.

The green and red arrows refer to the trends and whether they are going up or down.  They update this list monthly.

The top 4 terms on the list all refer to a kind of cancer caused by asbestos.  Per click costs of $146 sure tell you that a lead is valuable in that market!  And, in fact, the lawyers chasing those clients are looking at million dollar settlements.

So, what these numbers are telling you is what a customer is worth in those niches.  If you wanted to make money online just by doing SEO, pick some of those terms to get leads and then sell those leads to the companies paying $146 per click!

You will probably find the top few terms to be competitive since most Internet marketers already know this, but if you do this analysis in your market or niche, it can be extremely helpful to gauge the “commercial buying intent” of someone clicking on those keywords.

One more tip – do a search on the keyword(s) you are considering.  If there are no ads on the top or the side of the search results, that means the term does not have high “buying interest” so is not worth targeting.

There are many ways to make money online, but my favorite is here.  Check out this short video to see what it is.

The video I was using on the page that you see after you click on the link to the right was not converting, so I decided to try a geo targeted landing page. . . .

Will it work any better?

I have no idea, but it’s said that these geo focused maps as a background helps conversion. You can also use variables for city name and other terms to further make the page customized to your visitor.

Here’s what I see when I click on the link on the upper right of this page. If it’s working right, you will see a map of wherever you like.

Please Test This For Me!

You don’t need to opt in or anything, just click on the link to the above right and then let me know if it works properly and you see a map of where you live.

This is just a WordPress plugin that costs $7 and you can use the Google Maps street view or the satellite view.

If you want to know how well it works or doesn’t work, just send me an email in a week or two after it’s had some time.  Any time after May 1, 2013 would be good and I should have enough data by then to know.

Here’s the link to the offer on the Warrior Forum if you’d like to check it out some more.

So, are geo targeted landing pages a good idea?  Who knows, but they do look cool.

Instead of buying leads for your business, you can get unlimited free online sales leads by understanding a few basic principles.

Online sales leads – from understanding your market

The first step is to understand who you want to attract as a prospect or customer and then also understand what they are searching for online if they are looking for someone who does what you do.  Did you know there are tools that not only let you know what people are searching for in your niche, but that also tell you how many people are searching and how likely they are to buy?

Not only that, you can also find out which of your competitors are ranked highest on Google for those terms and how hard it will be for you to knock them off their top 10 spot.  The # 1 spot in a Google search gets 34% of all the clicks on the term.  If you’re not on page 1, you’ve wasted your time.

Online sales leads – it’s not only about sales “today”

As an average, something like 90% of all people searching online for someone who does what you do are not ready to buy today.  If you have a page they land on when clicking on your listing that talks to them specifically about they were searching for and offers them some sort of free gift/”buyers guide” that they can download, you can get their email and market to them using an autoresponder so they know, like and trust you and buy from you when they are ready.

Online sales leads – staying in touch until they are ready

If your product is candy bars at the checkout in a grocery store, this obviously doesn’t apply to you, so I am assuming here that you are in a business where people want to check you out a bit before buying – ie a higher priced product or service.

You will want to put helpful content on the Internet that when people find it, helps build a relationship of trust with them.  Offering content to help them to understand how to buy what you sell will differentiate you from your competitors who are only looking for a sale today.  Of course, you offer them that option, but just by the fact you are helping them how to understand how to buy your product, will build trust.

Online sales leads – dominate your market by showing up on top of the search result pages for your keywords

Although this is a long term strategy, if you do it right and get found online when people are searching, that will pay off for years and years.  You can learn how to do this yourself, have someone in your business learn it, or outsource it to someone who knows how to do it (me;).

If you want to learn how, the absolute best training on learning this is at the Empower Network.  That’s where I learned.  Specifically the $15K Formula training.  The training is expensive in that it costs $1,000, but is cheap in that there is 27 hours of video training that can get you a 1,000 time ROI.

I’ve spent over $85,000 on marketing training – online and off – in the last 10 years, and the Empower training is worth more than the other $85K I spent . . .  just saying.

Online sales leads – how they can be better than free!

If you buy the $25/month Empower blog platform, you can publish posts about your business on one of the highest ranked blogs in the entire world.  Why this is good is beyond the scope of this post, but you can call me any time and I’ll explain . . .  720-890-8760

If you are doing marketing on the Internet, landing page conversion is critical to your success.

Thanks to the Empower Network training I’ve bought, I’ve learned a few things about conversion of visitors to leads.  One of the very most important lessons in the case of an email promotion to bring visitors to a landing page is to make the graphics and copy congruent.

What I mean by “congruent” is that when a prospect opens your email and sees your message and image, if they click on it, the page they go to should be obvious to them that they are in the right place. Although I’ve been marketing for decades and on the Internet for quite a while now, I never really never got this until now.

The easiest way to explain this is to show it to you.  Here is an email blast I had sent out yesterday:

Then, when people saw this ad can clicked on it, they went to the landing page that looked like this:

The, because the message, graphics and copy were congruent, I got one of the best opt in rates ever – 48.5% of those who got to the landing page put in their info to opt in!

Now, let’s take it a step further to illustrate why this is so important.  My numbers for this ad were:

• cost to get the ad sent to 46,000 people – $250
• number of people who went to landing page – 258
• number of opt ins – 125
• revenue from immediate sales – $175
• net cost – $75
• cost per opt in – $75/125 = 60 cents each

Typically, I’ll end up with 8 customers from that amount of leads.  Then, if we count to total amount paid of $250/8 = $31.25 cost to get a customer.

This is a home run because my customer value averages $678.  So over a bit of time, I’ll get 8 X $678 = $5,424 of income from a ad that cost $250.  Not bad, think I’ll do it again!

Go here if you would like to see the actual landing page itself and check out the offer!  And go here if you’d like to get the training I use to do this.