It is well known that in order to do well with affiliate programs you need to know how to do keyword research. Finding the top keyword phrases that people search for using tools such as Keyword Elite, Overture Keyword Search, Google Adwords keyword tool or even the free Good Keywords tool can help. Let's say you are looking to market a product such as Dog Collars. A search on Keyword tools will reveal lots of long-tail keyword combinations that people typically search for. Such as:

Dog Collars and Leashes

Dog Collars wholesale

Dog Collars training

Dog Collar charms

It is extremely easy to find these keywords. Here is a hint to find great keywords without using any program mentioned above. Just go to Google and start typing in Dog Collar. You will see that Google suggests several typical searches or keyword phrases for you as you are typing. How easy is that!!! You should get a handful of quick and easy keywords that you can use within less than a minute worth of work.

Next, go and do some searches for the long tail search. Long tail just means that you are not searching for Dog Collars which would be the main keyword. Long tail means you go for something a bit more specific like Dog Collars and Leashes. Dog Collars is too broad and will have too much competition. I did a search for Dog Collar and Leashes and found that the competition was 549,000 on Google. But by assing an s, I found Dog Collars and Leashes had competition of only 390,000. This only takes a minute.

I like to find competition between 200k and 500k. Otherwise the pages would be difficult to rank for. Next I look at the sites presented. If it looks like the sites are extremely optimized, it may be difficult for this technique to work. But let's say the resulting sites looked like blog posts and sub pages to websites. This may take a few minutes to compare the keywords and the competitiion.

Now I just go off to http://domaindjinn.com and do a search for domain names that exactly match the keyword longtail that I just selected above. I will look for DogCollarsandLeashes.com. If that isn't available, Domain Djinn will recommend alternatives such as MyDogCollarsAndLeashes.com or Mydogcollarsandleashes.net As long as you have your keyword in the domain name, you can add news, blog, website, my or a number of other words as a prefix or suffix to the keyword phrase and you will be fine. The cost of the domain is typically under $9 and can be as low as $2 if you go with the hosting plan. But for an affiliate program you typically only need the domain. Once you get the domain, you can then point the domain to your affiliate link and then start your advertising campaign. Purchasing your domain should take you about 5 minutes. Pointing the domain should take 2 minutes.

The last thing I do is plug the domain into a search engine submission tool like All-In-One Submissions. Or if it is a blog, I may ping it with Ping-O-Matic.com. This takes about a minute to do.