Step 4. Research Tools:

Useful Tools to use to gather information on traffic, keywords and
your competitors:

Amazon.com– look at the product reviews to determine how satisfied a customer is. Make sure you are looking at verified purchases. Pay attention to how many were sold because a product can have a 4 star rating, but so few buyers it is not a good comparison.

Amazon Movers and Shakers:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/movers-and-shakers 

“Movers & Shakers identifies the biggest gainers in sales rank compared to twenty-four hours ago. For example, if a music item has a current sales rank of 10, but was ranked 30 twenty-four hours ago, its Movers & Shakers increase would be 200%”
This will show you the top products in gains and sales rank over the past 24 hours in any category. Drill down in categories for your niche to get ideas for products to promote.

Alexa.com – tells you traffic patterns and related domains as well as other places searchers go to. You can look up specific websites and see their traffic patterns. It will also score the website. The lower the number the better the websites is in traffic ranking. Alexa has free and premium paid services.

WordTracker.com -This is a paid service but I find it extremely necessary to get a real jump on my keywords and suggestions for long tail key phrases. Go to the questions section to see what questions people are asking on your topic. Use a general term to get the most results. Wordtracker also has a free option as well.

Quantcast.com: shows personal demographics of a website’s visitors as well as a list of related sites. This site will help you get an idea of your perfect customer. Who they are, how much they make, what their education level is and much more. Keep in mind that Quantcast only works on very large sites so it is great for researching brands and their demographics. You do need to create an account to use this service.

Google Keyword Planner is a free resource you can use to determine related keywords, advertising costs as well as volume of traffic. https://adwords.google.com

Create a free Adwords account or sign in with your Google account to access this.

Google Trends: Allows you to choose categories to narrow your searches so you can see if a search term/product is seasonal or if it has a trending history to let you know if it is on the rise has periods of surges or steady search traffic exists.

Find Even More Keyword Phrase ideas: https://Soovle.com – enter a keyword and get back phrases from Wikipedia, Google, Amazon, YouTube, Yahoo, Answers, and Bing.

Spyfu: This service shows you your competitor’s keywords, suggested related and most profitable terms as well as their ads running in Google Adsense. Other interesting data includes how long the ads run and related keywords your competition is using to drive traffic and estimated spend.

Author: Ginette

Search & Affiliate Marketing Strategist since 1993