Admit it. When you first decided to start a for-profit site online, you expected to make tons of money quickly. If you didn?t, we need to discuss the concept of keyword research vs hope.

There is a time tested way to start a business. Simplifying the process, the idea is to first figure out what you love to do. The second step is to identify how you can turn that love into a business of some sort. You might sell products. You might provide services. All and all, it really doesn?t matter. So long as you are doing what you like, you should be okay. This approach tends to bomb on the Internet. Yes, you want to pick an area that you love. The problem arises in selecting your service or product.

If you love a particularly subject that you can turn into a business, you need to be careful. Just because you are fanatical about it does not mean you know why other people are interested in it. If you pick out services or products based on your own interests, you are essentially hoping others are interested for the same reasons.

Hope is a vague concept. It inspires us in many ways and arguably makes us what we are. On the downside, it also causes us to buy junk business ?opportunities? for $19.95 that our common sense tells us are a scam. Maybe this will work just this one time. Yeah, right. On the web, hope is a very bad business strategy. Fortunately, there is something better.

The web is all about information. If you look long and hard enough, you can nearly always find what you are after. When developing an online business, you want to avoid hope and go with the hard facts. This comes in the form of keyword research, the most important information you need to know for your business.

People make purchases on the web because they need something. They have a problem and your goal is to provide the solution. If you have a hotel reservation site, you are solving the problem of finding somewhere to stay for people. In short, the key to success if figuring out what you potential clients or customers are having problems with.

Fortunately, they leave all kinds of evidence in this regard. The evidence is the phrase they type into Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines when they are looking for something. You can access this information by doing keyword research. There are plenty of tools out there, but I prefer Wordtracker. It costs money, but you can buy access to it for a couple of days for less than $10.

Once in the system, you can simply type in the root word of your site and see what people are searching for. With our hotel reservation site example, I would type in ?hotel? and run the program. There it is. A list of all of the problems your prospects are having in your business area. This is what they need help or solutions for. Your job is to provide it. If they need hotel reservations in Miami, you should provide such a service on your site. If they need them for Vegas, you better have a page for that as well.

With keyword research, you are able to identify the hard, cold evidence of what your potential clients are customers are searching for. Hope is great, but you want to stick to this list when developing a site.

Halstatt Pires is with MarketingTitan.com - providing internet marketing services.