Keyword research is an important step for many things, even SEO and affiliate marketing as they can be a success and failure of the ad campaign and the whole site. Keyword rich domain names still have a lot of weight in SEO. Make sure to do your keyword research the best way.

There are a ton of tools that can be used for keyword research. I believe the most used one is the free keyword tool provided by adwords. It is free and useful but I am not relying on it anymore. It used to be THE tool for me and I thought that the results were somewhat precise, but they are not.

Couple years ago I was running Netflix campaigns and they were converting very well. Adwords traffic was converting at XXX% with just a simple blog page that had Netflix banner on it. This is when I decided to build a full blown site around Netflix. I used their API to build a simple movie related site, but they removed me from the campaign before I had a chance to finish. I did a basic keyword research on google’s keyword tool, and it showed pretty good numbers for “online movies rent”, which made me buy onlinemoviesrent.com. As of today, I didn’t really finish the site, but have some content there. I rank decent for the keyword (6-8 on the page 1 for this month), however, out of 354 visitors from google this month, only 1 was for actual “online movies rent”. This is just an example, but make sure that you do as much keyword research as possible before investing time in the site. Don’t rely on 1 tool and if possible, use as many as possible, including 1-2 paid ones of your choice.  There are a few popular ones, such as keyword discovery, semrush, wordtracker, wordze, keyword spy, etc… You can find most of them on page 1 of google and they usually provide free trials or free top 10 results so you can evaluate and chose the one you like the best.

A lot of affiliates are moving to media buys these days, but I still like ppc traffic the most. Sure, google will suggest you some keywords that you need, but you can get 5 times more targeted traffic if you find a good tool and put more long tail keywords that have less competition. I used to test with google, then expand to yahoo and other ppc sources to get more traffic, but now I check for more keywords before exploring other traffic sources.

Anyway, do your keyword research! Let us know which one you love the most and why.