I would prefer not to pay $27+ to use Wordtracker since I'm on a pretty tight budget. Is there another resource that you know of that has similar results to Wordtracker for finding a niche?

In Holly's book, she lists:

Alexa.com
Nichebot.com
RankPulse.com
Google Trends
Yahoo's Keyword Tool
Cbengine.com

Anyone have any good experience with these?

Thanks for the help!

Wordtracker has a free keyword tool you could try. It doesn't give you competition (but you can get that yourself from Google), KEI or thesaurus etc. but is reliable and FREE.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

-Mark.

Wordtracker also has a free keyword tool that shows you competition and KEI...But you can only use it once and you need to register with your e-mail address.

I'll see if I can find the link to it.

Guido

O.K., here is the link: http://www.wordtracker.com/free-trial.html

It is actually the wordtracker trial, you can use it and get the results by e-mail. Use this after you have determined your main keyword. Then you can get more related keywords through the wordtracker trial with KEI, competition and number of searches.

Guido

Thanks for the help, Mark and Geedo.

From what I understand, Holly says what is important is less than 1 million sites and key phrases searched for are 200+/day. I'm not sure where KEI fits in with all that. Can you explain KEI?

Thanks,
Carrie

You can pay a dollar for a trial with nichebot. It lasts two weeks and you get 15credits which is essentially 15 searches, other features (like wordtrend graph) cost more credits.

What you can't afford upfront you'll make up with the time manually. Also, keep in mind that you need to invest in one of the tools because the free tools will only get you so far.

Nichebot and Wordtracker are the cheapest. There's Themezoom and keyword discovery which are 197$ and 97$ per month, respectively.