Your keyword research is part of the heart and soul of your Internet marketing efforts. That’s true for everyone and particularly true for those who are tying to corner the SERP market on longtail keywords. You spend hours finding those longtail gems with great search numbers and weak competition.

You would never willingly share your best keyword options with the competition would you?

Of course not.

Unfortunately, that might be exactly what you’re doing.

Here’s the scoop. There’s a lot of overlap between the online freelance writing world and the Internet marketing world. A significant percentage of ghostwriters are also marketers. When you send your writer a list of keywords, you might be sharing your hard work and research with someone who’s willing, ready and able to use it.

This isn’t just a one-on-one risk, either. Here’s a perfect example of how an unscrupulous “writer” or someone who is merely posing as a writer can steal your keyword research. Recently, I heard about yet another website for writers who want to do article work. Writers can log in, browse projects, and accept various assignments. Assuming their work passes muster, they get paid based on the client’s budget for the job.

A writer can peruse those listings, never accepting a single project, instead studying the keywords would-be buyers are targeting. For instance, I just logged in and found someone who wanted an article that used a particular keyword at 1% density. I did a little bit of research and discovered that this particular longtail has only 75 “in quotes” competing sites. Based on an average of three keyword tools, it gets around 1200 searches per month. It’s a buyer-ready keyword in a fairly lucrative niche and a smart marketer could dominate it with a single appropriately-optimized page and the right content. Based on cursory research, Adsense clicks related to the phrase should pay well above average. There are some good related affiliate programs, including decent pay-per-lead options that aren’t contingent on anything more than a visitor completing a very brief and non-invasive form.

In other words, someone out there uncovered a diamond in the rough. It’s not a “life changer”, but it has all the marks of a cool little profit generator. Then, unknowingly, they gave it away. I didn’t do the keyword research. I didn’t think of the niche myself. I just “found” it. Now, I’m perfectly-positioned to own it before the person who did the work gets a nibble on his or her request for an article.

I’m not going to do that. It isn’t my style. If I was a content purchaser, however, I wouldn’t assume that everyone feels that way. We know who’s out there and we know that there are plenty of ethically deficient and economically desperate people out there, after all.

Are you giving your keywords away? If you’re like most Internet marketers who outsource article/content production or who use sites like the one outline above, you most certainly are.

That’s why I’m going to start doing something new. It’s something that I don’t think most other writers are doing (or at least their not offering to do it up front). From this point on, all Big Red Notebook projects are coming with the guarantee that I will not share their keywords elsewhere and that I will not produce content for personal use targeting their keyword research. It’ll be a handy keyword non-compete/non-disclosure agreement designed to afford maximum protection to my clients.

Marketers: Stop giving your keyword research away!