The following is what I got out of reading all the forum post from day 1 and WAbinar by Jay on the topic of Keyword research to finding your niche. 

Keyword research strategy guide: 

*find ur niche/keyword by going into DMOZ or if u have something in mind.

1st step: Get 60,000 or less competition on quoted results in google by playing around with creating long-tailed keywords.

2nd step: go to WA keyword research tool and search for the keyword.  Stats we should look for: U want high # of search/month + low number of quoted search.. ideally low website competition <500.   U want high article power *7 or higher, PPC power and high comp. 

3rd step: go to google competition tool and type that keyword in the box: find something that's lower than 1000 or lower than 500 (the lower the better) 

 4th step: go to godaddy.com and search if there's a domain for it in .com, .org. or .net. 

5th step: look for available affiliate program and check out google search ads to see if ppl are monetizing that keywords.

6th step: if microsoft OCI tool available, check the % of online consumer intention (OCI) anything greater than 50% is good. 

If I am missing anything, please inform me or make a comment so we can organize the note in a way where new comers can come by and find these resources useful:)