Keyword Research

keyword-research
If you follow the steps I outlined in Market Research, you should now have some ideas about profitable market and niches. Once you've found your niche, the next thing you need to do is Keyword Research. It's a process where you find out how many people are actually searching for products within your niche market, what words or phrases they use to search online, and how competitive are the phrases.

There are free and paid keyword research tools. In this article, you will learn one free and one paid keyword research tool.

Ok, let's get started...

When it comes to a free keyword research tool, most people are familiar with Overture. Personally, I prefer to use Google Keyword Research Tool as it's faster and has more functionalities.

Here is how you can use Google Keyword Tool to do keyword research.

First, head on over to Google Keyword Tool. You will see the following screen...  

google-keyword-tool

Next, enter a keyword or key phrases in the box provided. Make sure you tick "Use synonyms" and choose data display "Keyword Search Volume".

For example, if I enter the phrase "online business" (without the quotes) and click "Get More Keywords", Google will churn out many keywords variations related to the phrase "online business".

Here is the screen shot showing a bunch of related keywords...  

related-keywords

Note the two columns "Search Volume" and "Advertiser Competition". These give you some idea the amount of users searching for the particular keywords and the level of competition.

Now, depending on your monetization plan... keywords that have high level of competition are better candidate for AdSense. On the other hand, if you're thinking of producing your own info-product, you want to look for keywords that have low competition.

Google Keyword Tool is a great way to quickly find a bunch of keywords to target.

TIP: target on those keywords that have average search volume (just point your mouse to the green bar to find out the search volume).

Next, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and choose text to save the keywords in a text file.

save-keyword-list
Keep this file handy as you will need it to do a more thorough analysis such as keyword demands/supplies, keyword competition, bid price, pay-per-click competition, positioning, etc...

Since Google Keyword Tool is a free tool, it doesn't provide such advanced functionalities.

I use it for initial research to identify keywords search volume and advertiser competition. But when I need to do detailed analysis, I use Keyword Elite software. I discuss this tool in another page. Click here to learn more about Keyword Elite.

This may sound like a lot of works and very tedious.. But this is how a profitable online businesses are built. More than 95% of people can't bother to do market and keyword research, that's why most don't succeed.

As mentioned, the final product of your market research is your business blueprints. Without a solid blueprints, it's like building a house without a solid foundation. So, you really can't skip this process, it's crucial to the survival of your business.