Much of what we do in Internet marketing starts with the process of deductive reasoning. That is, we try to determine where else on the ‘Net our target audience is spending time, and then create links in various ways with those sites.

Of course, the first thing to do is to define that target audience. If you don’t have a sense of who you are trying to reach, how the heck are you going to reach them? As an example, let’s say that I’m looking to sell bakery equipment. In that case, my target audience is anyone who would want to buy my equipment, most likely retail bakers, but also manufacturers of consumer bakery products, as well as large institutional kitchens. So now I’ve got some ideas to sink my teeth into.

So how do you find out where a target audience is spending time? Well, I’m about to reveal a few of the free services available on the ‘Net to let you do so.

Both The Informant & TracerLock are services that allow you to select words or phrases you would like to have tracked, and then provide you with the information free of charge. The Informant notifies you by email that your newest information is posted on your account at their site, while TracerLock sends it directly in an email to you. For my example above, I might want to track keywords or key phrases such as “bakeries,” “baked goods,” “cakes AND cookies AND pastries” (notice the use of Boolean language - see our marketing tip Searching Smarter from 4/7/99, and “commercial kitchens.”

A few other tracking services that you might find valuable are Search Engine Report, which provides you with the Top 100 search terms each week, as well as Company Sleuth, which “scours the Internet for free, legal, inside information on public corporations that you select.”

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