Finding keywords is the key to a successful marekting campaign.  Performing keyword research is absolutely imperative for driving your business forward.  Affiliate marketing is about finding hot niche markets.  A niche market is a specifically targeted market offering a product that satisfies a consumer requirement; in other words, it is the answer to a problem.  If you think of your niche markets in this way, you will always be successful in finding the right ones.  It is possible to market a product in two ways; to either choose a consumer and provide the product that consumer wants, or providing a product and finding consumers to purchase that product.  The affiliate finds the niche market, chooses the product to sell, then chooses a marketing technique and then builds a campaign leading to the sale or take-up of that service.  It is possible to earn money online within any industry but the key is to provide the right product to the right person at the right time and for the right reason.   It is best to concentrate on a product or service that you know something about, or at least have an interest in, as you are more likely to succeed if you are passionate about your subject. You can promote anything as an affiliate so there are no restrictions there. 

Research begins then, with targeting the audience and finding the product. Now you need to decide on the marketing technique you will apply to selling your product.  This can often be determined for you, by your available budget for advertising.  You might have a very limited budget, or you might have a budget allowing you to spend $5 a day whereby you can promote your website or product using Google's flagship advertising medium, Google Adwords.  If your budget is non-existent, you can still use affiliate marketing techniques that don't cost anything, such as article marketing, writing reviews or e-mail marketing. 

Google Adwords is probably the quickest way to get your product noticed and to help with search engine optimization.  Search engine optimization is very important whe it comes to your marketing campaigns.  Google Adwords is built around a quality score algorithm that determines how much you pay for your ads.  Each keyword is ranked in accordance with the rules of the algorithm.  Getting to grips with Google Adwords is not advisable until you have some experience under your belt, or you could just be throwing your money away.  One fantastic resource to help you with your Google Adwords campaigns is Beating Adwords, a comprehensive guide to learning how to utilise Google Adwords campaigns to drive massive amounts of traffic to your content and products.  It is well worth investing in this resource if you are going to be spending money on advertising using Google Adwords.

Researching your market is the most important part of an affiliate marketing campaign.  You will never get your business up and running unless you spend some time conducting comprehensive research and analysis of your market or topic.  Your campaign will be based on a set of keywords.  When you conduct a search on Google, MSN or Yahoo, for instance, the words you type into the search box are the 'keywords' and 'keyword phrases'.  The affiliate will need to find keywords with maximum search or demand but low supply or low number of search results, because the number of results is actually your competition.  You will need to utilise keyword research tools, both free and paid tools are available for affiliates.

When researching, try to find keywords that get approximately 350 searches per month.  It is important to keep the number of competing web pages low.  The lower the number, the easier it will be for you to achieve a page rank for that keyword.

The Google Keyword Tool is a free resource available to you; it is imperative that you become familiar with using the Google Keyword tool to help refine your research.  You can use the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool to help you find keywords and phrases.  You will also need to determine how much competition your keyword phrase is up against.  It is easy to search either in Google for the competition you are up against.  Simply type your keyword phrase in quotes, into the Google search engine box.  If your keyword has less than 15,000 listings,  it should provide your article with a good chance of being listed on the first page of Google.  If you do the same thing for Yahoo, typing your keyword phrase in quotes, provided you have a return of say 5,000 listings in Yahoo, again, you stand a good chance of featuring your article on the first page of Yahoo.

Remember, relevancy is key.  Your article must be relevant to your keyword.  If it is not, you are unlikely to drive much traffic to your web page or site.   Writing articles that focus on a product keyword will  connect you with the targeted audience for that product.  Do not base your keywords on estimated traffic as listed on Google or Yahoo.  This will have little effect.  If you abide by the rule, relevance and competition, you should achieve your desired result.  Find keywords with the help of the Google Keyword Tool or there are other free keyword research tools for you to use, some paid, some free.

DMOZ.com, the Open Source Directory, is the largest open directory on the internet and it lists 590,000 topics.  It breaks its topics down into different niches the way you would to find a targeted niche.  You will need to set up an account with DMOZ; this is one of the first things you should do; the directory is the only type of its kind online and gaining a good page rank is one way to use DMOZ.

Google Keyword Research Tool can help you:

• Find keywords based on site content - the Website Content option lets you enter your URL and AdWords will scan your page and suggest relevant keywords
• Create new, separate ad groups with similar keywords; create several ad groups containing focused keywords then use the keyword tool to find relevant keywords and define them into groups
  
• Identify negative keywords -  identify off-topic keywords
• Specify a language and location - find your keywords then tailor them to any language to reach a wider audience
• Start broad get specific - search broad terms then find your specific target keywords