If you’re like me you’ve made various attempts to make money online by creating blogs, websites, Google adsense, trying affiliate programs and even creating your own products and membership sites. After a few weeks or months with no sales and hardly any traffic you’ve probably become discouraged and given up, only to repeat the same process for another site.

Most like you picked a domain name that you liked or thought was catchy for your niche and started creating blogs on topics that you wanted to talk about and thought people would be interested in.

Unfortunately this is a series of fatal mistakes that can be remedied by doing some keyword research for your market. I recently started using a free trial version of Market Samurai (and have now purchased it) and the beauty is you can find keywords that have a minimum number of searches per day, but also not an overwhelming number of competing webpages. You can also do this with the free Google keyword tool, but it will take you more time. And Market Samurai can do many other things as well (which I’ll get into in future posts).

Market Samurai has a variable named SEO Value (SEOV) which is the estimated number of searches per day for the number one search position multiplied the average cost per click (on Google Adwords). So if SEOV equals $300 for a keyword, that would mean the estimate revenue per day would be $300 if you had the top spot. This assumes you are breaking even with your Adwords costs, although you could be making less or more, if you have higher priced backend offers for example.

Getting the top spot is often quite difficult, so you have to also check the SEO Competition which is the number of competing web pages. If you don’t get to the top spot you won’t get that revenue of course. This is not an exact science by any means, but can help you assess the relative value of keywords in your niche.

Many of us don’t do this type of basic research – finding out what people are searching for, making sure there is enough volume of searches, that there are buyers in our niche (based on assumption that if people are advertising there is money to be made), and making sure we use these keywords in our blog posts and other content. The good news is this is much easier that typical market research where you have to pay for expensive surveys.