Keyword research is an essential part of affiliate marketing.  It allows you to get easy traffic for SEO purposes or find converting keywords for pay per click marketing.  Taking half an hour to to use any of the popular keyword research tools out there will provide you a leg-up over the rest of your competition. This is because many internet marketers don’t even do any keyword research at all.

Certain keywords are better than others.  Some keywords are too competitive and you will have a hard time ranking well with them.  Other keywords don’t work well because not too many people are interested in that term.  This is where having access to good keyword research tools is important.  The best part is that a lot of good tools won’t even cost you any money.

My favorite tool for keyword research is called Market Samurai.  Although the full version of the program actually costs money, the keyword research module is completely free.  Plus it runs on both Windows and Macs which is very nice.  To begin using Market Samurai, you first have to type in a keyword related to your topic.  For example, perhaps you are starting a site centered around the best guitar courses online. Then you might want to enter in the keyword “learn guitar”.  Market Samurai will then spit out you a large number of keywords related to this seed keyword.  Market Samurai enables you to then further analyze all of these keywords and figure out which ones are the best to use.

To pick out the high traffic keywords, Market Samurai uses a metric called SEOT.  This value is the maximum daily traffic that the number 1 ranked site for that keyword might potentially get.  To pick out low competition keywords, Market Samurai utilizes a metric called SEOC.  This tells you how many sites Google has in its index that mentions this keyword.  As a rule of thumb, you want to use keywords that have a SEOC value under 20,0000.  Market Samurai also allows you to filter out the keywords that don’t meet your specific criteria.  This makes it very easy to come up with a list of great keywords.

As a member of PPC Coach, I know the importance of having a good list of keywords.  There are only a small number of converting keywords that actually lead to sales and uncovering those money keywords is the key to creating the next profitable pay per click campaign.  That is why Market Samurai is an essential tool for any internet marketers toolbox.

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