Picking a sensible Twitter handle might help

What’s in a name?  Quite a bit. Especially when it’s the written word. Seeing a name for the first time is the modern-day first impression. When I get a new follower on Twitter, I go through a quick process to determine whether not I follow back.  And part of that process is looking at your Twitter ‘handle’ (or ID or name). It’s an implicit (or explicit) signal about who you are. Below, I breakdown eight common styles of Twitter IDs, from best to worst. This is all my opinion, of course (and isn’t everything on my blog?). Your mileage may vary.

The Good

• FirstNameLastName – Probably one of the best Twitter handle styles you could have, barring your name isn’t fifteen characters long (the twitter max), or some hard-to-type odd combination. A good example of this is chrisbrogan. The URL to his site is the same as his Twitter handle. Boom. Another example is ScottMonty.

• FirstInitalLastName – Another approach to take that scores well from a readability and rememberability (yes, I know its not a word) perspective. This is the approach I use (abelniak) as well as my friend Joe Chernov (jchernov). For him, it’s also the same URL for Joe’s site.

• FirstInitialMiddleInitialLastName – Another great approach for the “short and sweet rememberability”. Two hallmarks here are David Meerman Soctt (DMScott) and Christopher S. Penn (CSPenn). In fact, Chris Penn taught me the idea of buying another URL (in this case, www.cspenn.com) and re-directing it to his website. Since I use abelniak as my Twitter handle, I bought www.abelniak.com and have that re-directing back to my site.

• YourCompanyName (or YourBrandName) – This is fairly obvious for larger corporations. My focus here is more f you are a one-man-band or a small company. A good example is Brian Clark (copyblogger). Copyblogger *is what Brain does*, so he makes a nice positive brand association here.

 The Not-So-Good 

• Some Take-off Of A Current Event – You like Tom Brady? You like Tom Brady so much that your Twitter ID is TomBradyQBChamp ? What happens when the Pats don’t win the Superbowl again? Better stick with something that stands the test of time, chief.

• Some Non-obvious Mix of Letters and Numbers – It might be great to you that you got married in 1998 or have a birthday in February… But if your Twitter handle is something like JoeCool4167, that letter combination is important and rememerable to you – but likely not others. So if I’m pecking out a Tweet on my mobile phone, and want to @ or tag you, and I can’t remember if it’s 4167 or 4176 or…. Ah, forget it….

• Some Intermixed Combination of Letters and Numbers – It’s cool that you use the numeral ‘0’ for the letter ‘O’. Or a ‘1’ for an ‘L’. But that makes it that much harder to remember and type… as well as look at.

• Some Combination of Letters That Doesn’t Resemble a Word – Is it a keyboard puke? Did you just slam your hands down on the keyboard and go with whatever came out? That’s even harder to remember than the previous two Twitter handle types I describe. Your combination might even be a word in your native language or a code of some sort. But if your primary audience doesn’t speak that/know that, you’re not really connecting.

What about you, reader? Care to share a really good or clever Twitter handle?

(let’s keep the not-so-good out of the comments here – notice I didn’t use any specific examples here – that’s by design)

image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chasingfun/2286399333/

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The Anatomy of a Twitter Handle – Eight Common Styles is a post from Alan Belniak's Subjectively Speaking blog. Click through to read more.

photo © 2010 Kevin Dooley | more info (via: Wylio)
When offering feedback on something in a group setting – an idea, editing a presentation, comments on a paper, whatever – think for an extra two seconds about what you’re going to say or offer.  If your contribution isn’t five percent or more of value, then be silent.  Sure, everyone has an opinion, and you can argue the word ‘big’ over ‘large’, or reversing sentence order, or a preferred comma style.  At the end of the day, offer value. If you’re doing it simply for your voice to be heard, you’re wasting everyone’s time – including your own.

(h/t: Lee Belniak)

The Five Percent Rule is a post from Alan Belniak's Subjectively Speaking blog. Click through to read more.

In the first and second parts of this series (Using Digital Media and Social Media for a Product Launch), I set up a foundation of listening tools to help uncover and start a digital search.  From there, I moved onto some basic mechanics – quick shots on how to find information and absorb it in new ways.  This post describes what I like to call ‘signals and smoke flares’ – looking for and setting up some of your own signals to find and get found out there.

• Company page on LinkedIn – Like it or not, this is how some people are going to find your company.  And some may even judge whether you’re a legitimate/reputable company based on how well you’ve got this web property set up.  So take some time to add all the necessary information.  LinkedIn is the de facto business social network, so it behooves you to have a company presence here.  In addition, consider adding it to your “to do” list to make an update every so often to show that your company has a pulse.  For more reading on this, see CMI’s Step-by-Step Guide on LinkedIn Company Pages.  If you’re outside the US and LinkedIn isn’t your thing, check out Viadeo and Xing.
  

  An example of a LinkedIn Company page

• Facebook Fanpage – If your brand, product, or company is a B2C or more casual good, this will probably seem like a no-brainer.  But even if you’re a B2B brand, you ought to consider a Facebook fanpage.  The reality is, many people are spending time in Facebook, not just on Facebook.  So you need to get found here.  Similar to LinkedIn, provide enough basic information so people understand what and who you are.  Use the power of iFrames to embed static HTML content (some of the same content you’ve already created for your company’s own web page) and build it in.  Or provided an excerpt or teaser, and ask people to ‘click here to read more’, and get them to come over to your web site.  Here are several resources I’ve collected about Facebook fanpages you can read.

• Looking for thought leaders and influencers? You probably know of at least one or two.  Perfect.  Hopefully they have a blog.  Now, go see who they read. And then go subscribe to those blogs and stay on top of the news.  Do this again at the secondary and tertiary levels, and in no time flat, you’ve amassed a good chunk of skimming and reading.  Throw those author names, one at a time, into a Google search with the word ‘twitter’ (minus the quotes), and Google will tell you their Twitter handle.

• • As an example, head on over to a prolific blogger in the PLM space, Oleg Shilovitsky.  It’s OK if you don’t know what PLM is – the point is still valid.  On the right, scroll down until you see the words ‘blogroll’.  This is who Oleg reads (and links to).  There’s a good chance that those people are writing and talking about similar content as Oleg.  You get the idea.

• • Whether or not they are influential is a different story.  There are many in-depth ways to determine this.  If you want a quick 10-minute assessment, read this post I wrote about determining online influence.

• Aside from using specific blog rolls, you can also use blog search engines like Google Blog Search and Technorati.  Using the advanced Google blog search is a bit better than the traditional blog search, so use that one.  Technorati is another good blog search engine, though it seems to be less popular than it was just a few years ago.  Nevertheless, it’s worth spending some time here.  Rounding out the set is IceRocket.  IceRocket is a third engine that also nets out good blogs.  Using one or two of these is fine.  If you have the time, use all three, though you will start to see duplicates, which is a sign that you’ve probably adequately mined the space.  What are you searching for?  Conversations about your space!  Search on key words, terms, lingo, product solutions, and the like.

• Struggling for key words to search on?  Don’t re-invent the wheel.  See what your competitors do.  Go to a competitor’s web site.  Then, depending on your browser, view the source code for the page (I typically use Google Chrome, so it’s CTRL+U).  Somewhere near the top (line 8 or 9 or something), you’ll see a meta description and a meta keyword listing.  Matt Cutts over at Google has said that Google does not factor in meta keywords into a Google search, but that doesn’t stop companies from filling out this item on web pages  – and it shouldn’t stop you from looking at that data.  The description likely is factored into a search, though Google likely won’t say where or how much.  That aside, this is for a thought exercise only.  Use it to help you frame how your competition is going after the market, and mimic or deviate as appropriate.
  

  An example of a web page's meta data

• These are actually elements of a baseline listening exercise that I advocate for many of the marketers with whom I work.  You might not have the time (or inclination) to conduct a full one.  To see listening as a case-study, check out this presentation I prepared for a Marketing Profs event.  In it, I advocate using a spreadsheet to track mentions across the Internet.  The point isn’t to go batty tracking everything, but rather start to get a sense of where might you have better success.  If you’re interested in the generic spreadsheet I developed for this, head on over to my ‘About’ page and get my contact information.  Send me a message and reference this post and a way for me to get it to you, and I’ll send it over.  Also check out this presentation (Social Media Listening: What’s In It For You), particularly at slides 41 and 42, to get a sense of the spreadsheet as well.

That rounds out this installment of the series.  If you read this and you’re chomping at the bit for more, head over to the posts below for more reading.  Two are by the super-knowledgeable (and affable) Mike Troiano (@miketrap on Twitter).  I constantly refer back to these posts to get information to pass along to others about setting up a content hub.  I also have a link to some of my own “how to” posts for social media.

• http://www.holland-mark.com/blog/2009/09/the-plumbing-of-social-marketing/
• http://scalableintimacy.com/ten-steps-to-build-a-basic-content-hub/
• http://www.subjectivelyspeaking.net/social-media-how-to/

How to Use Digital Media And Social Media for a Product Launch (part 3) is a post from Alan Belniak's Subjectively Speaking blog. Click through to read more.

If you work in a team environment (or “matrixed”, as it’s often seen, when those teams cross organizational boundaries), you often have a lot on your plate – and you’re not always the one doing the serving.  In addition, sometimes it’s a challenge to let go of the fun tasks, or the tasks that you want done “just the right way”.  If this at all sounds familiar, take a peek at my handy 4-box table.

There are no "maybe"s

Agree?  Disagree?  Let me know in the comments.

The Only Career Matrix You Will Ever Need is a post from Alan Belniak's Subjectively Speaking blog. Click through to read more.

In the first part of this series (Using Digital Media and Social Media for a Product Launch), I set up a foundation of listening tools to help uncover and start a digital search.  This post builds on that to round out some of the basics for getting underway in doing digital market research.

• use Twitter search – Even if you aren’t on Twitter yet (more on that in a moment), you can still use the search tool to peer into the conversation.  Twitter’s basic search tool isn’t that effective.  Instead, use Twitter’s advanced search.  Here, you can configure your search pretty specifically.
  

  Twitter's 'advanced' search

  For example, restricting results to include words, exclude words, searches just mentioning a specific hashtag , and – oddly – results that use a smiley face or frown face.

  • When I’ve explained this to people, most scoff at that.  But when I tell them to search for a competitor’s name and a frown face, I tell them that those results are potential leads.  The scoffing stops.
  • One other option you can select is ‘only show results that have links’.  This is pretty powerful to see what other people are saying (and what else and where else) they are reading about a topic.  And the best part?  Once you fine-tune these results, you can push them to an RSS aggregator (see the previous post).

• create a Twitter account, add a photo, a bio, and a URL – Now that you’ve reaped the benefits of Twitter search, why not join Twitter and start interacting?  Joining is painless (you’ll need a username, password, and an email address – like any web service these days).  But don’t stop there.  Part of what makes Twitter useful is connecting the right people.  Take a few moments to complete the bio, add a website, and add a picture.  I describe why that’s important in a post I wrote about Twitter follower counts. Then, jump in.  You can use www.Twitter.com (open it in a separate browser tab and check it occasionally), or use a tool like Seesic, Tweetdeck, or the many others that do the same thing.

• finding people on Twitter that matter (to you) – Once you get going on Twitter, you’ll want to follow people that are talking about what’s important to you.  A good way is to monitor some keywords, as outlined above.  Another way is to use directories, like Twello and WeFollow.  You can scan people’s bios and such to understand quickly if they are worth following.  Once you really get humming, you can consider using a service like Topify to make each new interaction worthwhile.  Another tool to consider is BlastFollow.  The site name is a little broadcast-y for me, but the service description is powerful: enter a hashtag (e.g., from a conference or current event), and follow all of those people en masse.
  • Be warned, though: Blast Follow doesn’t use the now-current (and preferred) OAuth method of connecting Twitter to a third-party application.  Instead, it asks you to log in with a username and password.  I suggest temporarily changing your Twitter password to something else, use the Blast Follow tool, and then change your password back.  Security aside, the tool is a good one: mass follow people who are talking about a topic that’s interesting to you.  You can always go back and un-follow people who no longer tweet about things that interest you.

Wordle.net scree capture

• use word clouds – Once you get into the Twitter groove, it becomes easier to scan tweets or groups of people for relevant terms.  Looking at the other words people use with your tracked terms is important, too (see the ‘child’ note in my point about using Google’s Wonder Wheel).  A free (and funky) word-cloud generator (like Wordle) is great for this.Push a URL or page through this engine, and out pops a word cloud, with the size representing frequency of use.  Quickly and visually, you have an idea of what the conversation (Twitter feed) or page (blog, site) is all about.  I previously wrote about this in a bit more detail here, and even provided instructions and an example.

• use adword and keyword planning resources – I often get asked this where I work (“How do you go about finding the right keywords?”).  So I wrote a post about using keyword planning resources as well.  Some of that post has what’s mentioned here, but that post also has links to a few other resources that are definitely worth checking out, including adword and keyword planning tools.

• find and participate in intelligent discussions – LinkedIn is “the Facebook for the business world”.  It’s also the modern day Rolodex. It’s also a great place to ask and answer questions, as well as participate in discussions in themed groups.  Search for groups based on title and keywords.  Join, listen, and participate.  Look at answers and questions, and look to see who is making those contributions (vice presidents?  individual contributors?  how do those roles map to your customer acquisition plan and target market?).

• questions and answers – Continuing above with LinkedIn, visit the Answers section and search for a keyword that relates to your business.  Change the display to open questions only
  

  Linked in Questions and Answers

  , and search for one you can answer.  Do this twice a week (or more, if you have time).  This starts to build your credibility.  As you answer questions, that gets posted on your LinkedIn page under activity.  People also get the choice to mark a particular answer as ‘best’.  If you consistently provide good feedback and answers for people, you’ll start to get noticed.  Quora is fast becoming a go-to place for intelligent Q-and-A.  Consider spending a few minutes every other day there to research terms, answer questions, and cultivate a community.

• webinars – Webinars have become cost-effective ways of essentially giving sales pitches or product demonstrations.  Some are overused and boring, but there are still gems out there.  Look to other webinars as a way to see where people are congregating, how people are positioning what it is that your company does, how the space or industry is viewed, and the like.  Here is a list of 100+ places that offer free on-line learning (some in the form of webinars) to help you find those resources.  Here’s another compendium of just webinar listings.
  • advanced play: creating a custom search engine - Here’s a really great article by ReadWriteWeb on how to set up a social media cheat sheet for any search topic.  This will take a modest amount of upfront work, but the benefits are great.  You’re essentially limiting your search of things to a smaller list of pre-determined sites (rather than the entire Internet).

The next post in this series will focus on outposts… or, leaving home and venturing out.

How to Use Digital Media And Social Media for a Product Launch (part 2) is a post from Alan Belniak's Subjectively Speaking blog. Click through to read more.

A friend of mine recently asked me to sit on his board of advisors for a new consultancy he launched.  My primary role will be to advise on all things social and digital media.  The first of such advice is related to the business as a whole.  How can one use digital and social media to get started?  To launch?  To get found? To take part in the conversations? The first in this series is below, titled listening.  To see others in this series, click on the ‘DMPL‘ category, or use the menu in the navigation header.

Part 1: Listening I

I’ve talked about listening in the past, but here is a more bulleted, action-oriented list to get started.  With new business idea firmly in hand, you need to go out and prove to the world that you’re worth someone’s share of eyeball.  How do you find the conversations worth your participation?  What words are people using to discuss your brand, industry, space, and pain points?

• start with some basis of search terms – At the outset of your business or initiative, you’ve got to know that you’re searching on something.  For illustrative purposes, let’s pretend it’s a mini-app or a widget that helps you book calendar entries/appointments across multiple calendars.  What words would be interesting to track online to see the discussion swirling around it?  Words that come to my mind include calendar, appointment, entry, meeting, and date.  Actions include book, set, accept, approve, and reject.  Now, pretend you’re playing the game Taboo (or Catchphrase).  In that game, the object is for a player to have his/her partner(s) guess the word on his/her card without using the word itself or five additional words listed on the card.  So – what are the five words that would be on the card if the main word was what you are searching on?  Secondarily, how would people go about getting you to guess the word on the card?  The exercise here is to think, quickly and out loud, for the ways people might be discussing your product, or the frustrations that go along with it, etc.

• using Google’s Wonder Wheel – Googling a phrase like ‘appointment booking’ yields over 440,000 results.  These might be useful on an individual level.  But instead, look at them in aggregate, and look for commonly-used words.  How?  Use Google’s Wonder Wheel.
  

  a Wonder Wheel example

  After running a search, look on the left side.  Scroll down and look for ‘All Results’ or ‘More Search Tools’.  Expand those to reveal the term ‘Wonder Wheel’.  What you’ll see is something that resembles a word cloud or spider diagram of terms.  These are the common phrases that appear in the top Google results for what you searched.  Click on any one of those to see a child wonder wheel implementation.  In just a few minutes, you can see some terms that people use to talk about this space.

• start with some basis of sites – Along with a start collection of search terms, you ideally have a collection of websites, even if only a handful, where this might be discussed.  They could be discussion forums, LinkedIn groups, Facebook fan pages, blogs, and so on.  With at least a few sites, you can use Google to help you find more.  Here’s how.  Go to www.Google.com. In the search bar, enter the URL for a site that you already have, the press ‘Google Search’.  It may seem odd, but yes, you are Googling a site for which you already have the URL.  On the results page, if the site has a modest amount of traffic, you’ll see some items at the tail end of the search result.  One of these is the word ‘Similar’.
  

  Google's 'similar' search functionality

  This is Google telling you it knows other similar sites based on this site.  Do this for a handful of sites, and then another handful.  In time, you won’t need to do this, but it’s a great start.  Hopefully, these sites are RSS-enabled so you don’t need to visit them every day.  Speaking of RSS…

• set up an RSS aggregator/feed reader – This is fundamentally important, because it acts as a second inbox for content.  Some bristle these days, saying that RSS is dead.  It may be ‘dead’ for one kind of use (serendipitously finding links), but it is alive and well for collecting automated feeds.  Setting up a refined, persistent Twitter search and pushing the results to RSS is a nice way to monitor a pulse in near-real time without having to run the search manually each time.  There are several to pick from (here’s a good list – I use Google Reader.  Also, ReadWriteWeb published a great article on extending the use of RSS. (And if you’re sitting there, quietly saying, “But – I don’t even know what RSS is!”, head over to Common Craft’s description of RSS in plain English)

Social Mention data

• Social Mention – Use a free social media search tool to show you results of your terms in the social space.  Social Mention is good for this, as is Omgili.  But I’ll focus on Social Mention for a moment, because the data other than the actual search results is key.  Go to www.SocialMention.com and enter the phrase, using quotes, “book appointment” into the search bar.  Ensure that ‘All’ is selected (one can restrict search to just blogs or just other sites; for now, we want it all).  Sometimes the results take a while, so be patient.  Temporarily ignore the main results/middle column.  Instead, focus on the content on the left.Using algorithms, Social Mention scores the relative strength, sentiment, passion, and reach of that term in the social space.  Scroll down to see top keywords associated with that search term, top people commenting or tweeting about that, and the top hash tags (related to Twitter) and places where these conversations are happening.  All this, and you haven’t even looked at the main results yet.  Pretty good stuff.

Google Alerts setup

• Google Alerts – Once you’ve refined your search terms a bit, head over to http://www.google.com/alerts and create some persistent searches.  Google alerts are like running a search on a term and getting the results, only that it’s done automatically.  Simply enter the search terms (use the preview to help you filter out signal from noise), pick the type (I recommend ‘Everything’), and how often (I recommend once a day).  You can get the results sent to an email address, or you can push them to an RSS/feed aggregator.

In the next entry for this series, I’ll continue a little more on some listening tools for keyword and term tracking.

How to Use Digital Media And Social Media for a Product Launch (part 1) is a post from Alan Belniak's Subjectively Speaking blog. Click through to read more.

Recently, Chris Penn (daytime job, blog, Twitter, and podcast) spoke at the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s Social Media Cluster.  The topic was Building the Right Community of Followers.  When fleshing out this topic, I immediately thought of Chris to speak.  He co-administers the Marketing Over Coffee LinkedIn group (along with his podcast co-host, John Wall).  I’ve been a member of that LinkedIn group for some time now, and I’m consistently impressed with how well its run: no spam, always on point, lots of value, and little moderation from Chris or John.

How To Build the Right Community is a post from Alan Belniak's Subjectively Speaking blog. Click through to read more.

Recently, I was asked: “how do you go about determining which keywords to research?  As in, I know that my product does ___.  How do I figure out how people are talking about that, and how do I get involved in those conversations?  It’s almost like I don’t know where to start.”

As I sat down to write out some steps, I did a quick search to see if others have covered this.  Sure enough, there’s a great post over at CMI, titled How to Find the Right Keywords for Your Content Marketing Efforts, talking about this same topic. This post here will overlap it (this is a quasi-re-blog), as well as offer up some of my own thoughts on the matter.  Either way, after you read this post and CMI’s post, you will be in good shape to start.

What’s Your Search Term Objective?

In this case, I knew my co-worker’s objective: get found in search results for these terms, and get people associating those terms with our product.  I’m going to assume that for now, this is your objective as well.  But this shuld be the first step you take: what is it, exactly, that you are trying to do?

In my co-worker’s case, it was to increase the position in SERPs (search engine result pages) for this paroduct when using these terms.  Note that trying to jump several positions in search for a very broad term (like, ‘Internet search’) is going to be a challenge.  But if you combine your search term with another key word (like ‘Internet search Samsung mobile’), it now becomes an easier game to play.  You’re going after longtail search terms, and those, by definition, are easier to get.  In time, as you start to earn the street cred for ’Internet search Samsung mobile’, you’ll start to get share for ‘Internet search’.

In Your Own Words, How Do You Describe What You Are Looking For?

You’ve got to start somewhere.  When you talk about your product internally, what are some of the words you sue to describe it?  If your mom asked you, “So, what is it again that you are working on these days?”, how would you describe it to here?  There will be a few key words that you can use as the cornerstone of your searching.

Next, print them out, big ‘n bold, and use these words whenever you create content: blog posts, press releases, tags in YouTube videos, meta tags in audio files and podcasts, tweets, partner press releases (if applicable) – you get the idea.  The point is, anywhere words can be found, use these words.  This will help these specific words gain street cred, as well as cement them in your own mind.

Putting Your New Search Term Knowledge to Work

You know what you want to do, and you have a starting point – great!  Now rank those words in order of importance (like, if you could only win the search war on five terms, what would they be?  And the next five?  You get the idea).  Then, filter out the straightforward ones, like ‘search’ (too difficult to ever gain any meaningful share).  Some of this should be intuitive.  As a litmus test, go into Google and search for that one word and see how many results show up.  On the left side of the page, change ‘anytime’ to ‘Past 24 hours’.  The number of results will drop, but it will still give you a rough idea of how competitive ‘owning’ that search term will be.

Here are some tools to help you understand where these words are ranking in search.  I suggest entering your top few into these engines and see what comes up.  Go to those sites, and see how they are discussing the topic.  What other keywords are being used?

• http://www.labnol.org/google-adsense-sandbox/
• https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Want to take this a step further?  Find the top sites that are using these keywords, and visit them.  View the meta tags on the page [usually ‘View Source…’ in IE] and look for the text near the top – look for meta name description and meta name keywords. This is the site saying to Google: “classify me as this”.  True, Google places less emphasis on this than in years past, but use it for what its good for: an indicator.

Other Keyword Search Word Resources

Re-read the first link above from CMI about this.  Inside that article, there are a few other jewels I’ve mentioend in the past and still use today (like Socialmention.com).  You can also ask someone on your web team (if applicable) to run a siteCatalyst, Google Analytics, or some other metric tool for the top words people use in search to end up on your current page of your site, or another page that is similar to the product you’re launching soon.  This will show you yet another view into how people are using search.

Next, take the first few sites you’re using for search and put them into Google.  Yes – Google the site that you know exists.  Stay with me.  If you’ve read my How to Use Social Media For Recruiting post, and can recall the second image (Google’s “similar” tool), then you know what I mean here.  By looking up the site in Google, you’ll see a bunch of other matches.  You’re not really interested in that.  Instead, in the first result (the site you entered), look for the word “Similar” next to the word “Cached” (note that they are not always  present).  Clicking this will show you a new page of results – a page of results that Google thinks, based on its algorithm/s, are similar to the site you entered.  Look at the keywords used there, look at the titles, site navigation, and general ‘feel’ of the site.

One other tool to consider (hat tip to Greg Boser for this one) is using the ~ in Google search.  The Google Guide explains this well, and you can jump right to the tilde search operator here.  Using the ~ in front of a search term (one or two words) will yield what Google considers synonyms.  So, ~cheap would yield used, budget, and last-minute.  Try using synonym search for some of the core keywords you’re considering, and see if they are worth adding to your list.

Conclusion

This will take some of your time.  If it could be completed in five minutes, everyone would do it, and then the process would get gamed, and it would ultimately take longer.  Doing this, though, will put you very close to your market and in tune with what people are saying and how they are saying it.

image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffmcneill/3925151948/

How To Find the Right Search Words and Terms is a post from Alan Belniak's Subjectively Speaking blog. Click through to read more.