Tools and methods for discovering new related keywords?

I have various methods for discovering more and more "long tail" keywords, but I've yet to figure out a good way to find more/all of the different but related groups of keywords that might work for a campaign. I'm wondering what tools people are using to help brainstorm new ideas. Just sitting down and brainstorming works well, but you always miss a ton of ideas too.

For example, say my primary keyword/theme is "making money". This is just the first example that came to mind. You could generate a huge list of long tail keywords that included "making money", but there are a bunch of other phrases you could go after such as "work at home", "extra income", "earn money", etc. Each of these could end up with 1000 long tail keywords each, which is the easy part once you have the idea, but I'm looking for a good systematic way to help ensure I don't miss any of these "major" related phrases??

Just curious how other people do it and what tools might be other there. Ideally there would be a tool where you could enter a concept such as "making money" and it would return related phrases like "work at home", "make money", "earn money", "extra money", etc. Does such a tool exist??

About the only decent idea I've come up with so far is to surf competitors and related websites. Generally in doing so I'll always come across words and phrases that I've forgotten, no matter what the topic. But surely there has to be a more complete and systematic way of doing this ...

 

hittail.com
thesaurus.com
typo tools

 

Thanks for the reply. Anyone else? Hittail is cool but in the case of a site promoted primarily via PPC it's only going to help you discover long tail variations of keywords you are already bidding on. I've got that covered. A thesaurus can be slightly useful but in general you're not going to discover related phrases such as "extra money" if you start with "make money" in your head. Not to mention a thesaurus is based around single words, not phrases. And typos have nothing to do with what I'm trying to accomplish. Thanks though!

 

Have look at the suggestions you get in Ask.com, Wisenut, Gigablast, Yahoo, etc when you search for a popular keyword (and dig deeper if needed)

That might return the kind of keywords you need.

 

NOW we're talking. Thanks for that idea!

I have this competitor who is apparently really REALLY good with keyword research. Any time I think of a new topic or phrase to bid on, he is already advertising on it. It's just killing me knowing that I'm missing out of lots of profitable traffic.

 

I agree. But once you've built up some decent content on your site, HitTail will start providing variations where there actually is some traffic, but not enough of it is leading to your site. It's sort of like a "middle" list--not quite a Thesaurus, and not words that are popularly leading to your site either. And it's even a good strategy for PPC, because the HitTail Suggestion list is stuff where you're under performing in Natural search, so giving it an instant boost in PPC is beneficial.