Are Paid For Keyword Research Tools Worth the Money?

Paid for keyword research wipes the floor with free tools. If you are trying to make money by writing articles then using free tools is like someone working on the Space Shuttle using tools from a child’s tool set.

Keyword research is absolutely vital. Without it you might as well be throwing your articles out of the car windows.

I have been doing keyword research for seven months now, ever since I started writing for InfoBarrel in June 2010. I wrote one hundred articles in a month using the free Google’s Adwords ™ keyword tool. Only ten of those articles have earned me even one cent over the past seven months.

In September I bought Market Samurai for $99. This is a keyword tool that analyses your competition for keywords that you input, but you have to think of them one at a time and search for the competition one at a time. The only broadband connection I can get is a satellite one and my bandwidth is extremely limited. If I use Market Samurai for ten minutes my bandwidth for the day is used up and I am offline.

Two thirds of the articles I did after Market Samurai keyword research have earned me money and the earnings are growing.

In December I signed up for a one month free trial with a monthly program called The Keyword Academy.

The Keyword Academy (TKA) subscription includes a massively powerful keyword research tool called Niche Refinery. I upload two thousand keywords from Google Adwords ™ searches and Niche Refinery analyses the competition for every single keyword at the same time. You get the results in a table that includes columns for ease of reaching top position in SERPS, monthly potential income and URLs and Google Page Rank ™ of the top four competitors.

The TKA subscription ($33 per month) is worth it just for Niche Refinery. Articles I have written using Niche Refinery keyword research are earning me $30 a month, after only one month, so my subscription is already paying for itself.

There are five other equally superlative programs available to you as a Keyword academy subscriber.

1. Postrunner is a very easy to use guest posting system.
2. Streamline is a project management system that keeps track of every link you build in your guest posts automatically. It also helps you find related keywords and tells you how many times you should use the different anchor texts.
3. TKA have a forum where some of the really big wheels spend a lot of time
4. There are webinars where you can ask questions
5. TKA tells you exactly how to reach top position in SERPS and which keywords are worth your while spending time on.

The free one month trial of The Keyword Academy gives you unlimited access to all these tools. The best way to look at it is as an investment in the tools that a writer needs.

Even after one month I am making my money back. As I write more articles and as my articles mature I expect to make a lot more.

Contact me by commenting below if you want to find out more about The Keyword Academy.