Written by Recently I found myself sitting in a lecture hall with a crowd 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 determine our relative ages. The purpose of this exercise was to determine how many in the audience had known a time before the arrival of the web. You see she, the lecturer, was making the point that the way we all do research has changed greatly since the start of the internet era.
Time was that when you planned to research certain career opportunities like beginning a new company you would need to conduct extensive market research, maybe a lot of surveys of your potential client base all of which would take a lot of time. But by using a few of the many tools available on the internet this can now be done instantly or at least a lot more speedily. 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 a few are free and others fairly expensive. The sort of tool you eventually choose to use depends on what sort of company you have in mind and how much time and money you can spend on this endeavour. There are also many businesses already online who will do all this work for you and give you a very itemised report regarding your potential targeted market. To begin this process you need to contemplate the sort of words and phrases your potential customers will use to find you on the internet, then input these into your chosen keyword tool. Probably the one that most 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 mostly 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 quite 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 probable 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 looking for your product then you know that it’s not liable to sell in large quantities. Another thing you can check for is the amount of competitors you are likely to up against. This too is very important when considering your probable career opportunities as you may have a excellent 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 use this method to produce results for you.
So as you can see by making use of the various internet tools available you can easily and quickly see whether any probable internet career ideas you have are worth pursuing, but remember this is just the beginning your likelihood of success will still come down to your capacity to co-ordinate all the elements of an internet company.
