In recent weeks I have received quite a few emails regarding the reference to Overture/Yahoo's Keyword Research Tool which is mentioned on pages 27-30 of my book.

As revealed in my book, this was a fantastic tool used by entrepreneurs in my 'inner circle' to do some investigative market research.... and find out how interested people were their idea/niche/product.

It showed you how many times a particular search term was searched online and thus gives an indication of 'interest level' in your idea.

Unfortunately, the Overture Keyword Research Tool is now DEAD.

Basically, the tool got hit so hard that Overture's servers couldn't handle the traffic and they shut it down... Now I am not saying my book was the sole cause for this... essentially a lot of [insert bad word] people began to write 'automated scripts' that spammed the service and made it impossible to use due to sporadic behaviour.

But don't worry I have explored the web high and low to find a replacement tool for you... and guess what... I found 2 !!!

Both tools are obviously modeled after Overture's and make fantastic alternatives...

1. Free Search Term Suggestion Tool by Keyword Discovery.com

Thye say their keyword data is complied and collected from a number of search engines to provide a far more accurate cross section of searches performed world wide..

Check it out here: http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html


2. Free Keyword Suggestion Tool by Wordtracker.com

On their site you simply enter a starting keyword to generate up to 100 related keywords and an estimate of their daily search volume.

Check it out here: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/keyword-suggestion-tool.html


Now with the Wordtracker tool they calculate the daily search volume using the following formula:

So for a keyword that appears 9,000 times in our database, this is the number of daily searches that we predict:

* Every day, on average, we collect about 3.64 million search terms from Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com, who according to Netapplications.com account for 0.63% of searches across all engines. By combining these two figures, we estimate that the total daily searches across all engines is 578.4 million.

So to all of you who emailed me, 'thank you', and I hope this helps !!!

If anyone knows of other tools that would be of help to us all please leave a comment on this blog and let us know.

p.s. If you want to watch a couple of cool videos on how to use the wordtracker tool check out Ed Dale's blog here:

http://tubbynerd.com/2007/02/04/part-1-your-new-best-friend/ and http://tubbynerd.com/2007/02/04/part-2-your-new-best-friend/

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