Recently I found myself sitting in a lecture room with a collection of much younger students, I am doing a course on web design as I have been contemplating a new career designing webpages, and the lecturer started trying to ascertain our relative ages. The purpose of this exercise was to ascertain 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 inception of the internet age.
Time was that when you planned to research certain career opportunities like beginning a new business you would need to conduct extensive market research, maybe a lot of surveys of your potential user base all of which would take lots of time. But by using some 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 normal way of doing this is by using a keyword analysis tool. There are a wide variety available to you a few are free and others fairly expensive. The type of tool you eventually choose to use depends on what type of business you have in mind and how much time and money you can spend on this endeavour. There are also many ventures already on the internet who will do all this work for you and give you a very detailed report regarding your potential targeted market. To begin this process you need to think about the type of words and phrases your potential users will use to find you on the web, then input these into your chosen keyword tool. Doubtlessly the one that lots of 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 primarily aimed at those who are contemplating 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 strength of your possible new career idea? Well let’s say you want to sell a specific product on the web you put a keyword or phrase into the tool and see how many searches per month are currently being made. If only a few people are looking for your product then you know that it’s not likely to sell in large quantities. Another thing you can check for is the amount of competition you are likely to up against. This too is very significant when contemplating your possible career opportunities as you may have a excellent product that many people are searching 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 utilize this process to produce results for you.
So as you can see by utilizing the various web tools available you can easily and quickly see whether any possible web career ideas you have are worth pursuing, but remember this is just the beginning your prospects of success will still come down to your skill to co-ordinate all the elements of an web business.
