Free online business tools for marketing your business on the internet

Melissa Cohoe

I just found out a new way to use the Google keyword tool to market any business. My thanks go out to Melissa Cohoe: her presentation yesterday evening to the members of my home business showed a technique that was new to me. Simple to implement, free and effective, these Google business tools will supercharge your business.

 The Google Keyword Tool 

If you have an online home business, you are probably already familiar with the Google keyword tool, but did you know you can use it for offline business as well? Melissa described a way to use it as a research tool to automate your search for prospects.

If you’re not familiar with the tool, search for “Google keyword tool” and it will take you directly to the tool: you’re ready to use it. Type in a phrase that you want to search for, and it will respond with the following information:

• The phrase you requested and a group of similar keyword phrases
• Competition for each phrase (low, medium or high)
• The number of global monthly searches for each phrase
• The number of local monthly searches for each phrase.

You can pick phrases you like (say medium competition, global searches over 1,000 per month for online work, or local searches over 500 for offline work) and use those phrases as a tool to grow your business. For online business, incorporate these keyword phrases in your blog post or article – you probably do this already – but did you know you can use these keywords to grow your business offline, too?

 Google Alerts 

You can grow your online business or your offline business using Google Alerts in combination with the Google keyword tool. Best of all, once it’s set up it is automatic, but you can still change it when you need to.

Start by selecting some long-tailed keywords that look good according to the keyword tool. (“Long-tailed keyword” is just a fancy way of saying a keyword phrase containing two or more words – preferably three or four.)

 Gmail 

The procedure I’m about to describe can generate a lot of email, so create a free Gmail account that you will just use for this activity. Once you have the account set up, create a Google alert for each long-tailed keyword in your list, making sure to enclose the long-tailed keyword in quotes. If you don’t use quotes, you’ll find that Google will generate an alert for each word of the phrase rather than the complete keyword phrase.

Set the frequency of the alert to suit your needs. You can always change this later and, of course, if you find new long-tailed keywords you can add new alerts accordingly.

Google will now search for any appearance on the internet of your long-tailed keyword and send an alert to your email. You will find out who is looking for this information on forums, for example, or posting about it on blogs or websites. Do you see how this beats searching for prospects yourself?

 Summary 

The three parts to this process (all free) are

1. The Google Keyword Tool
2. Gmail
3. Google Alerts

Depending on your needs and your choice of keywords you can use these online business tools for either online marketing or offline marketing. For example, if you are looking for local personal fitness trainers as a market for your fitness business, choose the appropriate keyword phrases and let Google search the internet for you.  You will find a list of prospects.