Keyword Competitive Myths by Dave Sherwin

Somebody in the network marketing business asked me today if they could really compete in keyword competitive situations. In other words: why try to get natural traffic if I'm competing against so many people? How can I compete?

It's a great question, and a common misunderstanding. But here are the reasons why you can win, even in a keyword competitive situation.

1. There are over a BILLION key terms out there. Notice I said "key terms," not "key words." Most people think that keywords are just single words. The fact is, most people search using phrases. For example, the person that asked me the question is in the network marketing industry, a very competitive space online. The term "network marketing" gets over 300,000 searches per month, and is very hard to compete for. But there are over 2,700 key terms just in the network marketing arena!

2. Your niche is interested in key terms you haven't thought of yet. For example, back to the 2,700 network marketing key terms. Within that arena, if your company sells a weight loss product, a whole new arena of "weight loss" and "health" phrases become available for you to compete for, increasing your total key term list into the tens of thousands of words!

3. There are words your niche is interested in that they don't know they're interested in! For example, if your prospect is interested in network marketing, there are tons of great ways to do network marketing online. So you could focus on business building tools like twitter, facebook, auto-responders etc.

4. Most people aren't working that hard to get the long tail keywords. The competition isn't as tough as you think. Once you are in the "long tail" arena, there's lots of room on the front pages of Google, Live, Yahoo and others. Remember, most marketers are lazy, if you stay the course you will pass most of them up like they're standing still.

So don't be discouraged by the competitive nature of the internet. You can rank for great keywords if you do some good keyword research, go after long tail words, and be consistent and persistent. And once that natural traffic starts flowing, you'll never look back!