Keywords Research - The Backbone of Online Marketing

One of the most important steps, if not the most important one, on the way to successful affiliate marketing (and internet marketing in general, for that matter), is keyword research. I am sure that by now you have heard of "long tail keywords," which are actually key phrases of 3 words or more. I will go right into an example, so you will immediately know what I am talking about.

Let us say you want to promote a product that has to do with sewing. Sewing is your hobby and you know a lot about it. If you check the keyword "sewing patterns" on Google, you will get over 1,300,000 results! Obviously, you do not want to compete against such a huge numbers of competitors. But, if you Google the exact long tail phrase "sewing patterns online" ("exact phrase" means searching the phrase in quotation marks), you will discover that there are only 10,600 results. If you know what you are doing - that is an easy niche to dominate.

I am using a tool that tells me not only how many sites use this phrase, but also how many sites are actually optimized for it. I can tell you right now that only 4 (that's a four!) out of these 10,600 are optimized for the key phrase "sewing patterns online". True, the same wonderful tool tells me that "sewing patterns" is searched 176,000 times a month, while "sewing patterns online" is searched only 4,500 times a month.

But this is still a nice search volume; and if you add to it the long tail phrase "sewing patterns costumes," which gets another 2,000 searches and zero optimized sites; and if you learn how to take advantage of these facts - you can start your promotion and dominate the search engines results for these two key phrases.

Conducting a comprehensive keywords research is absolutely essential to your success. This is the bread and butter of Internet marketing. There are many tools and many resources that will help you find all the information you need.

Always start with the broad term: "sewing", "cars", "diet", "loans" etc., and work your way into digging deeper and deeper, finding long tail keywords, checking Google, Yahoo and other search engines results, checking the monthly or daily search volumes, until you find 3-4 phrases of 3-5 words that have a decent number of searches and a low number of optimized competing site.

This is the most important step on your way to a lucrative marketing business. If you want to rank high in the search engines and get a lot of traffic as a result, you must spend the time and the effort and sometimes the money to use the best keywords for your promotions. If you find a very good tool at a reasonable price - invest in it. It will save you time and eventually it will save you money and will shorten your way to a lucrative online marketing business.