As an affiliate marketer, you want to learn the best ways to use keywords to help build your business. But if you don’t have any experience working with keywords, it can be a little confusing.

These helpful tips should assist you in being able to learn the best keywords and how to use them. First, you need the right tools to help you gather the best keywords. These are called keyword tools and their purpose is to show you which keywords people are using to search for things.

If you’re just starting out, there are some great free and paid keyword tools you can use. One of the good free ones is Google AdWords. You can also use tools like Wordtracker, SEMrush, NicheBot, Market Samurai, SpyFu, SEO Spyglass, Wordze or Keyword Discovery. Some of these have all free access, some free but limited usage offers and others are paid.

The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is very easy to use. When you pull up the screen, type the word or phrase you’re thinking of using on your website or blog. For example, if you’re selling acne products, you’d type the word acne in the box where you list the word or phrase.

When the words come up, you’ll see: acne, cystic acne treatment, adult acne treatment, best acne treatment, etc. The tool will show you if the competition is high, medium or low and what the volume of global and local monthly searches is.

One helpful tip is that you also want to cover other terms people would use to search for acne. To get other words people might be using, you can pull up an online thesaurus and type in acne. You’ll get a response of: blemishes, pimple, skin inflammation etc. – and you can put those words in the keyword tool and see how they rank.

You want to make sure that you’re looking for both broad and longtail keywords. A broad keyword has the potential to bring more views to your site if you’re able to rank high for it.

These are words that people use when they’re looking for something, but aren’t completely sure what they want. For example, someone might type in the keyword ‘shoes.’

When you’re doing keyword research, you also want to look for exact matches. An exact match is how it sounds. Your keyword or keywords exactly match what someone has typed into the search engine. For example, if someone types in ‘black lamp’ and you have that as your keyword, it will lead them to your website or blog or ad.

You want to make sure that you use longtail keywords. A longtail keyword is a set of 3-5 words that are better targeted toward someone’s search because they’re more specific. While ‘play guitar’ is an example of a keyword phrase, an example using longtail keywords would be ‘learn how to play guitar’ or ‘how to play guitar notes’ or ‘how to play guitar for kids’ etc. Longtail keywords are important because you can get more traffic because you rank well – and you’ll end up with higher conversions.