Many aspire to be number 1 on Google. They think their prospects sit down in front of their computer and are typing words into their online search like "toys" or "painter" or "vitamins" or "make money" hoping they will obtain the expected results.

This type of thinking positions online business owners to market and sell what they think are mainstream and blockbuster products and services. They put in a lot of effort and money to get found but have little success because they are in market segments that are highly competitive, crowded, and have low profit margins.

The highly qualified leads, your cash cows, aren't the random Internet surfers that type in "toys" or "painter" or "vitamins" or "make money". Your paying customers are the Internet users that are more specific and more targeted than that. They are after a particular item or service, often thought of as a niche, or more targeted, offering.

For example, if I need a hand-tied bouquet of flowers delivered by 10am tomorrow in New York City, I don't care who gets the business as long as they deliver.

So, if you are a florist in Manhattan, you would be far better optimizing your web site so that you become number 1 on the Google search results page for flower, bouquet, next day, and Manhattan ... these are the more specific key words that your customers are using to find a specific product or service. These are the phrases that should be leading prospects to you.

There is a whole discipline around the Web's economic shift away from mainstream, one-size-fits-all, markets versus narrow and targeted markets with niche goods and services. These groundbreaking idea are described by Chris Anderson in his book The Long Tail and are critically important for Internet Marketers.

Our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of blockbuster hits to a huge number of niches.

The riches are in the niches.

Here is a tip for you to do early in your efforts to become an Internet Marketing professional.

Determine what words and phrases your customers are using to find you and then capitalize on that information. You can use Google's Keyword Tool, or Yahoo's Keyword Assistant, to find the words and phrases that your customers are using in their search query. You then add these words and phrases to the meta descriptions about your site and to the various text pages on your site.

Adding these descriptions to your site and text pages is referred to as On-Page SEO. You perform this activity so that your site and content is optimized for the Search Engines. The words and phrases that your customers are using to find you are added to the titles, descriptions, and text pages. This helps a Google search query to easily find you, serve up your site, and improve the ranking of where your content is displayed on the pages of search results.

Effective analysis to determine keywords and effective usage of identified keywords enable you to have many page 1 listings on the relevant pages of search results.

In order to help you, I will continue to post (on this blog site) tips and techniques I have obtained and learned from My Go-To-Market Partners as I became a Digital Entrepreneur and built aspenIbiz, my online business, along with my various Web 2.0 properties and affiliate web sites. Together, these tips will provide a traffic formula that will improve your ranking and drive qualified leads to your web site.