Summary: <br> If you have signed up to email newsletters from any of the big internet marketers, I am sure you would have heard about the launch and the discounted offers on Long Tail Pro – a keyword research tool. There were a ton of emails floating around and pretty much everyone recommended this tool. In fact a lot of marketers use this tool.<br> A few days before Long Tail Pro was re-launched, there was another keyword research tool that was launched – Niche Genetics, which pretty much did the same job as that of Long Tail Pro – but with a difference that Niche Genetics helped you find profitable Niche and Long Tail Pro helped you find long tail keywords. How is this different?<br> I still remember buying the “Keyword Elite” software from Brad Callen for about $197, when it was released about 8 years back. Then I found Market Samurai and then Micro Niche Finder. I bought both of these and if you are asking why, then the answer is plain and simple. I was confused, overwhelmed and struggled with the entire activity of researching keywords with the first 2 softwares. While I got a refund for Market Samurai, I couldn’t do it for Keyword Elite because by the time I tested it, I was already out of the Money-Back guarantee period.<br> Market Samurai is a great tool and a lot of marketers use it, but somehow I felt it was just not for me. I was really overwhelmed with the many filters and options in there.<br> Finally I found Micro Niche Finder and this is the tool that I am using until today.<br> Almost all of these softwares use the same source for their data – Google’s Keyword Tool. The only difference lies in how they present it with some analytics of their own, so that you know which keyword or, niche to go after.<br> Over the years, as Google changed their Keywords tools to the Keyword Planner and restricted the data that was available, these softwares also changed. But still their source remains the same.<br> So, the question is – Do you really need a paid software when Google Keyword Planner is FREE?<br> Let’s take a closer look at Long Tail Pro – This software adds a few aspects to the research. The source of the data for Long Tail Pro is also the same. But it uses a confidence score to tell you how hard or, easy it will be to rank on the search engines for that specific keyword.<br> In addition to that it also gives you some additional data in the form of Domain Authority, Page Authority, Moz Rank, Domain age, # of backlinks etc. all of which will help you evaluate and analyze your competition. If you were to do all of these individually, you would have spent a lot of time doing it.<br> Same is the case with Micro Niche Finder. It uses a competitive measure called as SOC or, Strength of Competition to evaluate the competition.<br> So, what these tools basically does, is that they speeden up the process of keyword research. You can save a lot of time if you use these tools. But do you really need them – You might not.<br> If you know the basics of what to look for while researching a keyword or, a niche and you are ready to spend time doing that, then you can do that with the help of the Google Keyword Planner tool.<br> Doing Keyword Research the Right Way!<br> What is keyword research and how does it differ from niche research? These are 2 terms that are used as synonyms, a lot of times but in reality they differ. In fact keyword research is just one part of niche research. While keyword research involved researching keywords that people use to search for something, Niche research involves a lot of other things like profitability of the niche, demographics, ad costs, content research, market research etc.<br> Niche research is the first thing you need to do as you plan for your business. Finding what niche and sub-niche you should get into and researching if there is money to be made in it and if there is a hungry audience i...
