You gut instinct is simply the collection of your past experience and current knowledge. As you live more and do more, your "gut" gets smarter.

People refer to "gut" instincts as street smarts and it ONLY comes with experience. So to make your "gut" smarter, you simply have to do more to get more experience faster.

The best thing to do is to ask people who are smarter than you ( in the niche of your question ) and get several opinions, on which you can then get a "feeling" or "consensus" and then make an informed decision.

The BIGGEST thing here is not to be afraid of making the choice, but look at possible failure or failure itself as a powerful teaching tool that will sharpen you and make your "gut" smarter.

The more you do something, the better you will get at it and the smarter your "gut" will get along the way.

I think we all get gut instincts that are just awful, but once in a while we'll get one that may just work. I personally go with physical facts, but it's sometimes good to go with your gut.

This is a tough one to explain.

In order to make a perfectly rational decision about a given choice, you need to know a certain amount of stuff.

If you can't know all that stuff, your gut has to make up the difference.

If your gut and the data disagree, you go with the bigger one.

If they're roughly the same size, go with your gut.

Now, I personally do things a little differently: I check with my gut at several points along the way. If the data are consistently disagreeing with my gut, I go with the data rather than my gut.

Like let's pretend I'm doing keyword research on five different terms, and my gut says to go with "foot powder" as the money keyword - but I need to know six specific things about the keywords before I make my choice.

If two out of the first three things I need to know say "foot powder" is the right keyword, I'll go with it. I'm done. That cuts my research time in half.

But if the first three things I want to know ALL say "foot powder" is the WRONG keyword, my gut doesn't matter. I'll ignore my gut and just use the data. And once I get three pieces of data that point to a specific keyword phrase, I use that one.

The entire point of using your gut in a decision process is to reduce the time you waste on research. If you're agonising over decisions, UR DOIN IT WRONG and you need to hustle it up.

As far as gut instinct goes, I could tell you horror stories of when I overrode what my gut was trying to tell me and when good things happened when I listened.

I don't know if it's really experience that gives you the gut feelings or if it is experience that teaches you how to listen to what was already there. I believe it's always been there, just needs to be developed.

In Christian circles, most believe it's the Holy Spirit guiding you - but that 's a whole other ballgame.

As far as making choices such as keywords, domain names, or any other decision that some might consider of a more mundane nature - as opposed to much bigger life decisions - I think that your gut, or inner knowing, could lead you in the right decision.

While doing research on a subject, I've felt, or sensed, whether that topic was good for me to continue or not. Sometimes I've just had to let everything go and move on to something else if I felt that I wasn't heading in the right direction.

Bottom line is that I think when we truly take the time to listen to what our inner voice is telling us, we can be far more successful, and stay out of trouble, far more often than if we didn't listen in the first place.

Recently a friend was telling me about how women are able to know the father of the children even if there were many possible fathers. That is a strong example of guts over facts. I guess in some things it is more reliable to go with your guts.