How do you decide which keyphrase to base your article on?

[astoneuab]

I have a question for anyone that has been "successful" with article marketing.That question being:

How do you find a "sales triggering keyword" to base your article off of.

I have read many posts on this forum on how to pick the best keywords and key phrases to write your articles on. There is a great post by Daniel Molano (unfortunately can't link to it yet) that tells of how he picked a random keyword from a keyword tool based off of the fact that it had high search volume and low competition in Google. In theory this seems like a great way to pick a keyword to base your article on.

However, after doing some research and doing some thinking, I figured there had to be more to it than that. I really got interested in keyword research after I read one of Ruck's free reports (Affiliate Article Marketing Domination 101 - can't link to this either yet =D) not long ago. The report was published awhile ago, but it made some of the best points about picking keywords for article marketing I have seen.

Ruck says, "For me, I could never spend time focusing myself around a keyword that I was not 100% sure was a “sales triggering keyword”. That statement makes a lot of sense to me. Why would you just shoot blindly in the dark, it seems an awful waste of time.

I think there are a lot of people out there who are trying to succeed with article marketing, yet they are having little to no success because they aren't focusing on these "sales triggering keywords".

Ruck recommends using PPC to find out which keywords in a niche sell, and if you have ever done any PPC advertising, you know exactly what he means. It's crazy how certain phrases of words tend to be the ones that "trigger" a sale.

So here is where I need a little bit of help. With a niche such as dateing, it would be fairly easy to set up a PPC campaign and throw in a few long tail keywords and monitor which ones made sales (Using something like Prosper 202, which works off of Sub-Id tracking through the large networks) and which ones did not. But, lets say my niche is Blue Jeans, or Pencil Sharpeners, or any of the millions of other products that are being sold on the internet.

How might I set up a TRACKABLE campaign that would help alert me to profitable keywords for me to base my article marketing around. The problem here is the tracking. If the niche you are in is being run through a big PPC network like Affiliate.com or Hydra, your life is much easier. You simply set up adwords along w/ Prosper 202 and in a few days you can clearly see what keywords you need to focus on (even if you lose money).

So finally, I guess I am asking. How can I find which keywords in niche X are profitable keywords? What resources do you use? What has worked for you?