There are tons of free tools available for affiliate online research. There are a few I am currently using.  Below I will tell you what I am using and how I am using it. If you have more tools, and know better ways to use the tools I am using please post it up in a comment.

  1. Google Analytics
    • This tracking service is very handy.  You place the code snippet in your site, and it will report back, traffic, what page visitors land on, what page visitors exit from, how much time they spend on your site, and where they navigate to within your site.   It will also show what geographic location visitors come from, how they found you, either which search engine, or where the direct link came from, and what browser they are using and a lot more.
  2. Google AdSense
    • If you have made it this far you should already know what Google AdSense is.  This is a program to advertise on your website without hassle.  You just paste a few lines of code into your site and sit back and watch the money come in (well sort of).  Google uses a PPC program (Pay per click).  Every time someone clicks on one of the ads on your site you earn a commission, a few cents to maybe  50 cents.  The ads are automatically tailored around ketywords found on your site.  The impressions, clicks, CTR and eCPM are tracked for you, and you can setup custom channels so you can determine which ad placements, or ads from different sites are making money.
  3. Google Adwords
    • I am new to Google Adwords.  And advertising costs money.  So what I want to stress here is the tools sections in adwords.  There are a few things I use.
    • The keyword tool.  This free tool can analyze your site and suggest keywords, or you can type in key words.  It will the display how much search traffic these keywords generate, and the competition for these keywords.  I use the competitive information to determine if I will be able to display a good assortment of high paying ads on my site (PPC ads from AdSense).
    • Insight or Search – This is another handy research tool.  You input keywords, and it shows you where the searches are coming from and the volume over time.
  4. Google Webmaster
    • This is basically a portal for submitting your site for the Google bat to crawl.  Alot of people think this is an inefficient way to get ranked, but I still determine is necessary.  There are tools to help find bad internal and external links, and  any meta data issues.  This tool will also analyze or generate a robots.txt file.
  5. XML-Sitemaps.com
    • This handy tool is great for creating an XML sitemap for you. It supports up to 500 pages, which is enough for most, (definitely enough for me), and offers outputs for download in XML, compressed or uncompressed, html, text, and more. Just run the script and then upload to google. Whammo, you have a sitemap for your site.

Update:  part 2 is here.