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Your keyword choices are critical to your success in nearly any
online business model.  Whether you’re pursuing PPC, blogging, VRE
and AdSense, or any number of Internet marketing opportunities, the
keywords you choose can make or break your success.

Keywords are important for several reasons.  First of all, there’s
traffic.  If you choose the wrong keywords to target, you’re
probably not going to get nearly as much traffic as you’d like.
Whether you’re using PPC or search engines to get your traffic,
your keywords are going to affect your ranking and link performance.

Another reason why keywords are so vital is the fact that you need
targeted traffic.  Ten thousand visitors coming to your domain via
the keyword “books” is probably going to be worthless compared to
500 visitors who come via the keyword phrase, “Harry Potter books,”
if that’s what you’re selling.

Someone who is searching for “books” is probably just browsing.
They may not even be interested in buying anything – they could be
interested in selling books, book history, book publishers, and
more.

But someone who is searching for “Harry Potter books” is probably
ready to buy something right then and there.  So it’s not enough to
just get a lot of traffic – you need a lot of traffic that’s
willing to take the action you want them to take.

Whether you’re looking to sell ebooks, promote affiliate products,
get leads for a CPA offer, or just get sign-ups to your list, you
want targeted visitors who are likely to be buyers now or in the
future.

Once you’ve chosen a niche you’d like to pursue, you need to
research the keywords you’ll use.  If you’re writing articles,
you’ll need to choose keywords to use in the titles and text.  If
you’re building niche websites, you’ll need to use keywords in the
domain name.  If you’re buying PPC traffic, the keywords you choose
will likely be one of the biggest factors determining whether or
not your campaign is profitable.

WordTracker is a very good tool for researching keywords.  If you
can’t afford to get a paid membership there (even for a day), they
have a very good free keyword tool at
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com.

Google has their own keyword tool, but they don’t show you numbers.
They only give you a general idea of the searches a keyword gets,
as indicated by a colored bar:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

To start, you’ll first want to enter a base keyword for your niche.
Let’s say you’re targeting the golf niche.  You might enter “golf”
into the keyword tool of your choice.  Then the keyword tool will
show you a number of related keywords.

You might come up with “golf clubs,” “golf tips,” “golf swing,”
“golf bags,” “golf carts,” and “golf courses.”  This is a short
list of more broad terms. You’ll want to eventually generate a big
list of keywords that you can use over the coming months and years,
so get started today!