In a nutshell the most successful niche marketing technique involves finding long-tail keywords within your niche, with the least competition and the most searches. This is the best way to get organic search engine rankings and traffic. This sounds simple but it needs to be approached in the right way if you are going to get ahead of the competition in affiliate marketing.

If you've been in affiliate marketing for any amount of time, you've probably heard about niches. Niches are the most profitable method of marketing products online. However, in order to make niche marketing work for you, you've got to find the right keywords for your products and websites. How then do you go about this? In essence, it comes back to that word which is at the foundation of any successful enterprise, namely research.

To do good keyword research, the most vital piece of equipment you will need, and don't worry this one comes free, is your brain. While there are keyword research tools available (and most of them cost money), there is really no substitute for thinking. Put yourself in the position of your potential customers. Ask yourself what someone would type into a search engine if they were looking for what you sell. Come up with as many words or strings of words as you can. The best keywords are strings of three or more words, called long-tailed keywords. Long-tailed keywords bring in the most targeted traffic, since they're very specific. For most campaigns, you should start out with a list of at least 10 long-tailed keywords.

The next step in conducting good keyword research, and thereby becoming successful in niche marketing, is to determine if the keywords that you have written down are going to be profitable, and how much competition there is for those words. Type your keywords into a search engine, preferably Google and put quotation marks around the keyword of keyword phrase, e.g. "keyword phrase". If the results you get are less than 10,000, and if there are paid ads on the search results page, then the keywords are probably good ones to use. Too many results, and the words have too much competition. If there aren't any paid ads, the words probably aren't profitable.

Finding long-tailed keywords, which will be searched for and which have relatively little competition, is the way to become profitable in online marketing. This in essence is the most successful niche marketing technique and if you have this one in place, the foundation will be set for your affiliate marketing business.