The economic state of the the country is effecting everyone financially. Workers are bring home less and less of their hard earned money. Due to this recession, many people are considering how they supplement their present income and grow their bank account. Therefore, more people are being attracted to working at home and making money online.

One of the areas that is becoming more popular is affiliate marketing or marketing someone else's product for pay. A new person researching deciding whether to become an affiliate marketer will probably experience information overload.

To begin it is necessary to research the market. Although, this is a very simple step, most beginners over look it and try to take the fast tract to profits.

The important place to start is locating your customer base and find out what they need or what problem you can solve for them. This is what keyword research is plain and simple. Find out what words and phrases people are typing into the search engines to find solutions to their problems. They make use variety of search engines such as, Google, Ebay and Yahoo to name a few. Ignoring this step will impact your success as a affiliate marketer significantly.

By finding and using keywords that your potential customers are actively entering into the search engines, this will increase your websites and landing page ranking, generating a flow of free targeted traffic.

Start with the free Google Keyword Tool, which can be found by searching for "Google keyword tool external," and enter in a keyword or phrase that identifies the product or niche that your targeted market is interested in promoting as an affiliate.

Click on "get keyword ideas" to generate a list of keywords and gage the competitiveness of the the market by taking a look at the number of times people are searching for your main keywords per month.

What you are looking for is a market with existing demand, competition and products readily available, but not so competitive that ranking highly is almost impossible.

What's important here is that there must be an market for whatever you choose to promote. Since you are an affiliate, your costs for entering a market are not very high, it’s still a good idea to take the time to do niche research in order to avoid wasting your time and money.