Affiliate Marketing Keyword Research: 6 Places to Find Keywords You Can Actually Rank For

Most people starting affiliate marketing pick a topic they love, write a dozen posts, and then wonder why nobody is reading them. The answer is almost always the same: they skipped keyword research, or they did it wrong. They targeted phrases that massive brands own with thousands of backlinks, and their content never had a chance. Keyword research is not a nice-to-have step you do once and forget. It is the single most important decision you make before you create any content, whether that is a blog post, a YouTube video, or a podcast episode.

In this video, Alston walks through six specific places to find keywords for your affiliate marketing business. These are not paid tools that cost hundreds of dollars per month. Most of them are completely free. The goal is to find low-competition phrases that real people are actively searching for, where your new site or channel can realistically show up in results instead of getting buried under brands with years of authority. What makes keyword research hard is not finding keywords. It is knowing which ones you can actually win. This guide covers both.

What You’ll Walk Out With

How to use Google Trends to spot rising topics before they peak
A free tool that maps every question real people are typing into search engines in your niche
Three distinct ways to mine Google’s own autocomplete for phrases your competitors are ignoring
A wildcard YouTube search trick that surfaces completely different results than standard alphabet soup
How to spy on competitor YouTube channels using free tools to see their exact ranking keywords
Why visiting competitor websites reveals the content gaps where you can build authority fast
A Chrome extension that shows keyword data inline while you browse, plus its one critical weakness
Not sure which niche is right for you? Find your starting point at finder.platformproof.com

Why Keyword Research Is the Foundation, Not a Feature

Before getting into the six places, it is worth understanding why keyword research sits at the top of the affiliate marketing skill stack. Without it, you do not know what your potential customers are actually searching for. You do not know what questions they are asking or what problems they need solved. And critically, you do not know who you are up against.

Take a phrase like “how to lose 10 pounds.” Type that into Google and the results are dominated by WebMD, Healthline, Mayo Clinic, and major media outlets. Those sites have domain authority built over decades and millions of backlinks. A brand-new affiliate site competing for that phrase has almost no chance. But “how to lose 10 pounds in my feet” is a completely different story. That is a specific, long-tail phrase with far fewer people targeting it. That is where a new creator can actually get found. Keyword research is the process of finding hundreds of these specific phrases before your competitors do.

It also takes time to get right. Alston is honest about this in the video: you will pick keywords that looked good and then discover someone with much more authority has already covered them thoroughly. That is part of the process. The key is to keep narrowing until you find the corner of the internet that is genuinely underserved, plant your flag there, and build up. Once your authority grows, you can go after more competitive phrases.

Place 1: Google Trends

Google Trends is a free tool from Google that shows what topics are popular right now, this month, and over the past several years. If you are brand new to affiliate marketing and have not yet picked a niche or a specific angle, this is your starting point. It answers the question: what do people actually care about right now?

The way to use it is simple. Go to Google Trends and type in a broad category. If you are interested in gaming, you might type “video games” or “gaming.” At the time this video was recorded in mid-2019, results in gaming were showing Call of Duty, Ghost Recon, and Fortnite as top searches. If you searched health, Keto was dominating. Those trend signals tell you where demand is concentrated right now, which gives you a starting point for finding more specific keyword phrases using the tools below.

Google Trends also lets you filter by geography, time range, and category. You can compare multiple topics to see which is gaining or losing ground. This is useful not just for picking a niche but for timing your content. Publishing a post about a topic on the way up gives you a window to capture traffic before it peaks and before bigger sites pile in.

Place 2: Answer The Public

Answer The Public (answerthepublic.com) is a tool that deserves far more attention than it usually gets in affiliate marketing circles. The concept is straightforward: you type in a keyword or phrase, and it returns a comprehensive map of what people are actually searching for around that topic.

The results break into three main sections. The first is long-tail questions. If you type in “affiliate marketing,” you get questions like “how does affiliate marketing work,” “is affiliate marketing worth it,” “can affiliate marketing make you rich,” and dozens more. These are the specific questions your future readers are already typing into search engines. The second section is comparisons. You might see “affiliate marketing vs dropshipping” or “affiliate marketing vs pyramid scheme.” The third section is an alphabetical breakdown, similar to what Alston calls the alphabet soup method, which shows every phrase starting with each letter of the alphabet in combination with your keyword.

As an affiliate marketer, your job is to provide solutions to customer problems. Answer The Public shows you exactly what those problems and questions are, organized in a way that is easy to turn into content. Use it in combination with Google Trends, not as a replacement for it. Trends tells you what category is hot. Answer The Public tells you what specific questions people have inside that category.

Place 3: Google Search (Three Methods)

Google itself is not just a search engine. It is a keyword research machine if you know how to use it. There are three distinct methods inside Google that Alston covers.

The Alphabet Soup Method

This is well known in affiliate marketing circles and for good reason. Type your keyword into Google, add a space, and then type the letter “a.” Google’s autocomplete fills in the most common searches beginning with that phrase and the letter a. Write down anything relevant, then repeat with b, c, and so on through the entire alphabet. You end up with a list of real phrases that real people are actively searching for.

One thing Alston points out that most people miss: you can run the alphabet soup from the front of the phrase too. “H affiliate marketing” returns very different results than “affiliate marketing h.” Running both directions doubles your output. If you were searching around Sharpie pens as a niche, “affiliate marketing Sharpie a” and “a affiliate marketing Sharpie” would surface completely different keyword ideas.

When you are evaluating these results, you need a realistic sense of where your site stands. If your site is brand new with no content and no backlinks, you are at level one. Compete against other level-one sites, not the major publishers. As your domain authority grows, you can fight for bigger phrases. Think of it like a video game: you start by defeating easy opponents, then progressively harder ones as your stats increase.

The “People Also Ask” Section

When you search any phrase on Google and scroll past the first few results, you often see a box labeled “People Also Ask” or “Questions Also Asked.” Each question in that box is a real search query that Google associates with your original search. Click any of them and three or four more questions appear below it.

This is a rabbit hole that goes very deep very fast. You can start with “affiliate marketing for beginners” and end up reading questions about pancake recipes if you keep clicking long enough. That is not a bug. Each question is a signal of what real searchers want to know next. The goal is to pull out the questions that are directly relevant to your niche, add them to a spreadsheet, and build content around them. These are usually lower-competition than the main search terms because they are more specific.

Bottom-of-Page Suggested Searches

At the very bottom of Google’s search results page, there are usually eight to ten related search phrases. These are algorithmically determined to be connected to your original query. They are often slightly different in phrasing from your starting keyword, which means they open different doors. Click any of them and you get a new page with its own autocomplete suggestions, its own “People Also Ask” box, and its own bottom-of-page suggestions. This is how you build a keyword map that stretches far beyond your original idea, all without paying for any tools.

Place 4: YouTube Search and Competitor Spying

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. Google is first. But Google owns YouTube, and that changes the game significantly. Ranking at the top of YouTube for a search phrase often means Google will also show that video in its own results, sometimes in position one or two. Alston uses a specific example: search “how to shoot a basketball” on Google. The top result, at the time of recording, was a YouTube video. Google promotes YouTube results because keeping users inside its properties earns more ad revenue.

For keyword research on YouTube, the alphabet soup method works exactly the same way as on Google. Type your keyword, add a letter, and see what autocomplete suggests. But Alston shares a second YouTube-specific method he stumbled across: the underscore wildcard.

Here is how it works. Type a space and then your keyword, go back to the front, and place an underscore before the space. So it looks like “_ affiliate marketing.” YouTube treats the underscore as a wildcard and returns top-level broad results. From there, add a letter before the underscore, like “a_ affiliate marketing,” and you get a set of suggestions that are noticeably different from what you get with standard alphabet soup. This gives you a second layer of keyword ideas that most people doing YouTube research never find.

The third YouTube method is competitor research. Find channels in your niche that are producing similar content. Using free tools like VidIQ or TubeBuddy, you can see the keywords and tags those channels are ranking for. Both tools have free versions. When you look at a competitor video’s keyword data, you can see exactly what phrases drove their traffic, then create content targeting those same phrases. You are not copying their content. You are finding out where demand exists and making your own better answer to that demand.

Not sure which niche or business model is right for you before you start building keyword lists?

The Finder quiz at finder.platformproof.com matches your current skills, schedule, and income goal to the online income model that fits best. Takes about two minutes.

Place 5: Competitor Websites

Your competitors’ websites are a keyword research tool that almost no beginner uses. The idea is simple: find the biggest sites in your niche and study them. Not to copy them, but to find what they are not covering or not covering well.

Alston uses a sports example. If you wanted to build a sports content site and affiliate around sports gear, you could go to ESPN or Fox Sports and look at what they cover. They are going to own the big national and international stories. Those are not your battleground as a new site. But there are things they are not touching at all. In the video, Alston mentions eighth-grade lacrosse in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. ESPN is not writing about that. Nobody with serious domain authority is writing about that. For a new site trying to build up, that gap is exactly where you can produce helpful content, rank, and start growing.

The practical approach is to go through competitor sites systematically. Look at their categories, their most popular posts (if they make that visible), and the topics they are writing about. Then ask: what related topic adjacent to this are they not covering? That adjacent territory is your entry point. Over time, as you build content and authority in those gaps, you can start competing for more central phrases.

Place 6: Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension

Keywords Everywhere is a free Chrome browser extension that adds keyword data directly to your Google search results page. When you search for anything on Google, a widget appears on the right side of the screen showing related searches, estimated monthly search volumes, and competition levels. It makes keyword research feel passive because it is happening in the background while you do your normal research.

It is useful, but it has one major weakness that Alston calls out directly: the data is not always accurate. Specifically, it sometimes shows zero monthly searches for a keyword when in reality there are five hundred or a thousand people searching that phrase every month. Those are not nothing numbers for a niche affiliate site. A phrase with five hundred monthly searches and low competition can send consistent, targeted traffic to a new site.

Because of this, the workflow is: use Keywords Everywhere to surface ideas, then go back into Google and manually search the phrase to see how many strong results come up, how much content exists, and how competitive the top results are. Keywords Everywhere is a discovery tool, not a definitive authority on search volume. Treat it that way and it is genuinely useful.

How to Use All Six Together: A Simple Workflow

These six sources work best as a system, not as isolated tools you rotate between randomly. Here is a repeatable workflow that uses all six in sequence:

Start with Google Trends to identify a broad category or topic area that is currently getting meaningful search interest. Write down two or three trending angles.
Move to Answer The Public and type in each of those trending topics. Collect the long-tail questions and comparison phrases that look like content you could create. Add them to a spreadsheet.
Run alphabet soup on Google for your most promising phrases. Go through the full alphabet, writing down every suggestion that is not obviously dominated by major brands. Run it from both the front and the end of the phrase.
Check the “People Also Ask” box for your top candidates. Click through multiple layers and add any relevant questions to your list.
Repeat the alphabet soup on YouTube and use the underscore wildcard method to find additional phrases. Use VidIQ or TubeBuddy to look at what keywords the top results in your niche are using.
Visit three to five competitor websites in your niche. Scan their content categories and identify topics they are not covering or covering poorly. Add those gaps to your list.
Browse with Keywords Everywhere active as you work through the steps above. Pull any additional keyword ideas it surfaces.
Evaluate everything in Google by searching each candidate phrase and assessing how competitive the top results are. If the first page is all major publishers with strong domain authority, the phrase is too competitive for a new site. Look for pages where smaller sites with fewer backlinks are ranking.

This process takes time, especially at first. But it gets faster with practice, and the results compound. Every piece of content you create around a well-researched low-competition keyword builds your authority, which makes the next keyword slightly more winnable.

Honest Drawbacks to Know Before You Start

Keyword research sounds straightforward in a tutorial, but the reality involves real stumbling blocks. Here are the ones worth knowing about before you invest time.

You will pick bad keywords at first. Alston says this directly. You will think you found a great topic, create content around it, and then discover that someone with far more domain authority already owns it. This is not failure. It is data. Every bad keyword pick teaches you to evaluate competition more carefully the next time.

Free tools have limitations. Google Trends does not give you search volume numbers. Answer The Public gives you questions but no traffic data. Keywords Everywhere gives you volume estimates that are sometimes wrong. Serious keyword research at scale eventually benefits from a paid tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush, but the six methods above can carry you through the early stages without spending anything.

Domain authority takes time to build. This is not something you can shortcut. Alston notes that YouTube builds authority faster than blogging, which is worth knowing when you are choosing your content medium. But neither is instant. Set realistic expectations: the keywords you target today will start sending you consistent traffic weeks or months from now, not tomorrow.

Low competition can mean low volume. The most winnable keywords are often the most niche. “How to lose 10 pounds” gets millions of searches. “How to lose 10 pounds in my feet” gets almost none. The goal is to find phrases that are specific enough to be winnable but popular enough to actually send meaningful traffic. That balance takes practice to find, and it varies by niche.

Find Your X

Before you can do keyword research effectively, you need to know what niche and business model you are building toward. Keyword research for a product review site looks different than keyword research for a software comparison site or a tutorial channel. If you are not sure yet which direction makes sense given your current skills, schedule, and income goal, the Finder quiz at finder.platformproof.com narrows it down for you in about two minutes. It matches your answers to the online income model that realistically fits where you are right now, so you are doing keyword research in the right direction from the start.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a paid keyword tool to succeed at affiliate marketing?

Not at the start. The six methods in this video cost nothing beyond your time. Google Trends, Answer The Public, Google autocomplete, YouTube autocomplete, competitor research, and Keywords Everywhere can carry you through the early stages of building an affiliate site. Paid tools like Ahrefs become more useful once you are evaluating dozens of keywords per week and need reliable volume and difficulty data quickly. But many affiliates have built profitable sites using only free methods.

How do I know if a keyword is too competitive for my site?

Search the phrase on Google and look at the first page of results. If every result is from a major brand, a government site, or a publisher with thousands of pages of content, the phrase is likely too competitive for a new site. Look for pages where smaller independent sites or YouTube videos are ranking. Those signals suggest the phrase is accessible. Over time, as you build more content and earn links, you can revisit more competitive phrases.

What is the alphabet soup method exactly?

It is a free keyword research technique where you type your main keyword into a search engine, add a space, and then type the letter “a.” The search engine’s autocomplete fills in the most common phrases beginning with your keyword and that letter. You write down anything relevant, then replace “a” with “b,” then “c,” and continue through the entire alphabet. You can also reverse it, putting the letter at the beginning of the phrase to get different suggestions. The result is a long list of real phrases that real people are actively searching for.

What is the YouTube underscore wildcard method?

Type a space before your keyword in YouTube’s search bar, then go back to the very beginning and add an underscore. It looks like “_ keyword.” YouTube treats the underscore as a wildcard placeholder and returns top-level broad results. From there, you can add letters before the underscore to get autocomplete suggestions that are different from standard alphabet soup. It is a technique Alston stumbled across from another creator’s video and tested it himself to confirm it returns different results.

How is Answer The Public different from Google’s autocomplete?

Google autocomplete shows you what completions are most common for a specific starting phrase. Answer The Public organizes a much wider picture. It shows you all the question formats (who, what, when, where, why, how), comparisons, and alphabetical variations in one visual map. It also surfaces question patterns that autocomplete might not show because autocomplete only completes based on what you have already typed. Answer The Public proactively finds angles you might not think to search for.

What free tools can I use to spy on competitors’ YouTube keywords?

VidIQ and TubeBuddy both have free tiers that show you keyword data on YouTube videos. When you are watching a competitor’s video with either extension installed, you can see the tags the creator used and some indication of which keywords that video is ranking for. This tells you what phrases are driving traffic in your niche so you can create content targeting those same phrases with your own unique angle. Both extensions install directly in Chrome and work without a paid subscription at the basic level.

Why does building a YouTube channel grow domain authority faster than blogging?

YouTube content can rank in both YouTube search results and Google search results simultaneously. A blog post only competes in Google. Beyond the dual-ranking opportunity, YouTube videos also tend to earn backlinks and social shares faster than written content because video is more shareable. Alston mentions this not to dismiss blogging but as useful context for choosing your content medium. If speed of authority building matters to your timeline, video has an edge.

How long does keyword research take before I can start creating content?

You do not need to finish all your keyword research before starting. A practical approach is to build a list of 20 to 30 low-competition phrases before you publish your first piece of content, then keep adding to that list as you create. Keyword research is ongoing, not a one-time event. As your site grows, your research will evolve: you will find new gaps, better opportunities, and phrases you could not rank for before that are now within reach. Treat it as a weekly habit rather than a phase that eventually ends.

Sources

Google Trends: trends.google.com
Answer The Public: answerthepublic.com
VidIQ Chrome extension: vidiq.com
TubeBuddy Chrome extension: tubebuddy.com
Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension: keywordseverywhere.com
Original YouTube video by Alston Godbolt: youtube.com/watch?v=e5GQrKuNX_4