In the second of the “Affiliate Marketing News” sequence of articles, I will talk about the second step you need to take on your road to become a successful affiliate marketer. In the previous article I showed you some ways of finding good products, and in this one I will discuss the way to choose the right keywords for advertising them.

You have probably already heard of what they call “long tail keywords.” These are phrases of at least 3 words or even more. Let me give you a simple example, which will make it very clear.

Let’s say you want to promote a product that has to do with sewing. If you check the keyword “sewing patterns” on Google, you’ll get over 1,300,000 results! Obviously, you don’t want to compete against these kinds of numbers. But if you Google the exact long tail phrase “sewing patterns online” you will discover that there are only 10,600 results. If you know what you’re doing - that’s an easy niche to dominate.

I recently purchased a tool that shows how many web sites are optimized for any key word. Let me tell you that out of these 10,600 sites just 4 (four!) are optimized for “sewing patterns online.” The downside is that the same great tool shows me that “sewing patterns” receives 176,000 searches a month, while “sewing patterns online” gets only 4,500 monthly searches.

But, and there is a but, 4,500 searches combined with another log tail keyword such as “sewing patterns costumes,” that has over 2,000 monthly searches and zero optimized web sites, brings your total to almost 7,000 searches a month - a very nice search volume. And when you read my following articles, you will learn how to take advantage of these data and start using the search engines for your promotions.

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,” and work your way into digging deeper and deeper and 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.

Keyword research is the most important step on your way to a lucrative marketing business. Spend the time and the effort. 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.

In a couple of days I will publish the 3rd article in this series, in which I will point out different ways for online promotion of products.