Keyword research is a bit of a pain but it absolutely must be done if your affiliate marketing efforts are to be successful. In fact, this job can be fun if you follow these keyword research tips:

First of all, don't use "high level" keywords like "dogs" or "affiliate marketing" - these are far too competitive. Use what are called "long tail keywords". For example, if you type "affiliate marketing" into Google, you get more than eleven million results. Believe me, you will never be able to compete for this keyword. However, if you type in "affiliate marketing for newbies" Google only returns 130,000. That's still a lot but "affiliate marketing for newcomers" only has 29,600 results which is an improvement so I'm sure you see what I'm getting at. Basically, the higher the number of searches and the lower the number of competing pages the better.

One of the best keyword research tips is to try to put yourself in the shoes of the searcher. Many people are trying to solve a problem so will use terms like "how do I", "how can I", "how to" and "where can I find" so you could try putting one of those in front of your keyword and see what results you get.

You can add something afterwards too; take the weight loss industry (by the way this is very high competition, so I don't recommend it) - you won't want to use "lose weight" which has 16 million results but "lose weight for my wedding" has only 34,000. "Lose weight in 6 weeks" has just over 30 thousand pages and "lose weight after pregnancy" has around 32,000 pages.

Another of the best keyword research tips is to look at categories on Amazon or other shopping sites. You'll see that many are broken down "for women", "for men" and "for teens" so try including those terms in your keywords.

If you're trying to attract buyers, i.e. people who already know that they want a product but are still researching which type to buy, try putting "buy" or "where to buy" in front of your keyword. Buyers also like to read reviews and product comparisons.

If you follow these keyword research tips, you're sure to come up with some high search volume, low competition keywords.