Market research vs. keyword research: Do you know the difference?

Keyword research is very important to your online marketing campaigns. Whether you're an affiliate marketer or wanting to promote your own information product, keyword research is going to be very important to your success online.

However, keyword research is only part of the puzzle. If you want to ensure your success online, you're going to have to look at the market as a whole.

Market research and keyword research are often interchanged but they are actually quite different. Before you start your next affiliate marketing campaign or begin creating your next product you should do some market research.

Market research looks at the market as a whole and not just the specific keywords.

When you do keyword research for a specific term your research program (whether it's Wordtracker, Adwords or some other variation) will return a list of keywords. These keywords represent your market.

Instead of looking at the keywords individually at this point, you just want to look at the market as a whole. Look at the list of keywords and analyze it.

There are two different keyword categories that these keywords can fall into – informational keywords and commercial keywords.

Informational keywords are keywords that are related to searches for information. If you're doing market research on cameras, informational keywords would be "free camera lessons" or "camera care."

These words are related to information about cameras but not necessarily buying a camera.

Commercial keywords are related to purchasing. In this case they'd be "right camera to buy" or "best DSLR camera."

Commercial keywords and informational keywords are part of your market analysis. When you are looking at a potential market, you should choose a market that has a mix of both keywords. You need both to be successful.

Commercial keywords will be used to create affiliate marketing money pages. The searches for these keywords will lead directly to your pages where you are promoting products to meet these needs. You can also use these commercial keywords to create information products.

Informational keywords can be used to create free content that will attract readers to your offer, whether it's an affiliate offer or your own information product.

When you choose a market with too many informational keywords, you won't have enough keywords to create a product or traffic coming into your affiliate landing pages. Without keywords that can convert to sales you'll be wasting your time. With too many commercial keywords you won't be able to create enough helpful content.

Once you've narrowed down the right amount of commercial and informational keywords in your market, you can begin to find the most popular and most profitable keywords for your market.

Traditional keyword research methods, like analyzing monthly searches and the amount of competing sites, will help you find the right keywords to use to optimize your pages.

As you can see, finding the market first and then the keywords is essential to your success. If you focus only on the keywords you might be limiting yourself and work yourself into a corner. Find the market and then find the keywords and you'll have a long term business.

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Gabor Olah

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