Researching your niche is an important stage because you want to find out if your chosen niche will be profitable for you. Plus you are entering the beginning stages of product research as well.

Remember, in this stage, you especially want to know…

·    Are other people passionate about your niche? If not, do they have a desperate problem they want to solve?

·       Is the market big enough, but not so big you’ll have too much competition when you’re just starting out?

·       Do the people in this niche spend money?

·       What products are being successfully sold right now to this niche? Can you sell something similar? Can you improve it, give them something they want that all other products of their kind are currently lacking?

Let’s run through the steps for this important strategy.

Step 1 – Keyword research. Build a spreadsheet with the most common searched-for terms for your niche. Start with some basic keywords (i.e. if you were in the crafts niche, you would start with the word “crafts” and branch out from there)

Here are some good keyword tools to help you generate your starting list:

·         http://www.kwbrowse.com – Good keyword visualization tool

·         http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com – Free version of keyword tool Wordtracker

·         http://www.goodkeywords.com – Free Windows software for finding keywords

·         http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/ – Search engine keyword tracker & keyword ranking tool

·         http://www.nichebotclassic.com – Still a great resource, also powered by Wordtracker

·         http://www.keyworddiscovery.com – Paid or free trial

·         https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal – Google’s free tool

There are MANY more keyword research tools out there. With the demise of Overture’s free service, many of them are still out there, but provide outdated or useless information. These are a good bunch to start with.

A couple more useful resources:

·         http://www.terapeak.com – Researches eBay auctions over the last 30 days

·         http://addictomatic.com – Research site that scrapes the web for keywords you specify

Step 2 – Discover your major competitors in this niche. Perform some Google searches for your main competitors and see who the advertisers are in the right-hand panel (i.e. Google Adwords advertisers).

Make a list of the top 10 competitors you will face (i.e. only those who sell similar products to what you are considering—for example, if you’re going to sell an info-product, ignore the ones with physical goods).

This is one gem for finding out if your market is hot. If companies are paying for advertising for similar products as yours, it’s a good indication they’re making money. If they weren’t, they could afford to keep paying for ads.

Step 3 – Research the top discussion forums and communities for your niche.

Do a search on Google for forums in your niche. For example, if your niche is freestyle Frisbee, you might do a search for “freestyle Frisbee forum” or “freestyle Frisbee discussion board” or “Frisbee discussion”.

Forums are a GREAT way to find out what your market wants. Sign up as a member to these forums and start by “lurking”. That is, just spend some time reading all the posts. Then when you feel more at ease with the group, introduce yourself and start asking questions. Tell them you’re considering buying one of your competitor’s products. Get their feedback. Ask them what they like and don’t like about it, etc.

Step 4 – What blogs do they read? Check out the top blogs in your target market by doing a search on:

·         http://www.technorati.com

·         http://www.blogcatalog.com

Also check out the “blogrolls” at each of the blogs you visit and see who else they’re linking to. Make a list of the top 10 to 20 blogs or so here:

Step 5 – Check out YouTube.com and Google Video (http://video.google.com) and do a search for your keywords. See what videos come up. Are they marketing-related? Do they include a website address on it to learn more, where they’re selling a product or service?

Step 6 – Do a search on Google, Yahoo, and MSN and see who has the top rankings for your keywords

Step 7 – Other miscellaneous research. Search PRWeb.com and look for any press releases related to your market. Search EzineArticles.com and save the articles that are related to your market. Use Alexa.com and Compete.com to see which of your potential competitors are getting the most traffic. Search Google using your keywords and add “+ezine” or “+newsletter” at the end to find email newsletters.

Step 8 – Search clickbank.com and cj.com to see what products in your market are being sold and for how much.

Armed with this information and the information in the other posts you now have plenty of information at your fingertips  to ensure you find the best possible niche markets to get into.

Let me show you a process to go through when you’re trying to brainstorm for niche market ideas.

For starters, I’m always aware of trends and current events in the real world. I read several newspapers each day, many magazines, both general and niche-specific, I watch the news, I listen to the radio. Occasionally something that I hear or read will stick with me. I may record my thoughts on my portable voice recorder, jot down some notes, whatever happens to be convenient for me. Sometimes I’ll call my office voice mail and leave myself a message.

But at some point I’ll have several broad ideas to research. I want to look deeper. And I want to make sure there is a good market for them before I even think about creating a product. So I’ll begin completing the following steps:

Google Zeitgeist – http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

To begin with, I check out the hottest search trends at Google Zeitgeist.

From here I can select:

•    Google Trends – For a broad look at search query data, enter up to five search terms to see relative popularity over time.
•    Trends for Websites – Google Trends for website traffic data. Type in a website address to see visitors by region and related sites visited.
•    Insights for Search – A deeper dive into search query data for marketers and power users. Create your own lists of “most popular” and “fastest rising” queries for different geographic regions over time and by topic.
•    Hot Trends – The top 100 fastest-rising search queries right now (U.S. only). Updates throughout the day.
I can also click on “Year-End Zeitgeist” or “Zeitgeist Archives” in the upper-left corner to look at past trends, especially if I’m researching cyclical or other trends over time.

At this point I am just looking for ideas. If I see that a particular topic is hot, I’ll make a note of it and look at more targeted sub-niches later on at more specialized sites (which I’ll show you shortly).

Lycos Top 50 – http://50.lycos.com

The Lycos Top 50 is another site, like Google Zeitgeist, where I will review the latest trends and look for hot topics to explore further. I will also look at Yahoo! Buzz for ideas as well (see below).

Yahoo! Buzz – http://buzz.yahoo.com

eBay Pulse – http://pulse.ebay.com

The eBay Pulse site is a great place to start looking at sub-niches. What I will do is select the category first (using the topics I’ve gathered from looking at the previous sites), then look for profitable sub-niches by then selecting a sub-category. The best chance for success is if I am as specific as possible with my niche selection. In the example below, I don’t want to sell to the “crafts” niche. I want to sell to grandmothers who enjoy giving their latch rug hooking gifts to their families and friends. You get the idea.

Also, I’ll always check the largest stores as well to see what they’re selling. There has to be a reason they are the largest stores. They must be doing something right.

Now that I have some potential sub-niches to work with, I want to see how much of a market there is there. Just because a sub-niche is popular doesn’t mean people spend money on it.

Amazon – http://www.amazon.com

Amazon is a great place to see what currently exists for any given sub-niche. Chances are, the more books there are written on that subject, the more that market spends on those topics.

Next I may use certain qualifying keywords to discover potential niches. You may have heard these called “discovery keywords”, and they are exactly that.

If you go to Google and type in any of the following keywords (make sure you surround them with double quotes for exact matches):

•    How to
•    How do I
•    How do you
•    How to fix
•    How do I fix
•    How do you fix
•    How to prevent
•    How do I prevent
•    How do you prevent
•    How to cure
•    How do I cure
•    How do you cure
•    How to remove
•    How do I remove
•    How do you remove
•    How to quit
•    How do I quit
•    How do you quit
•    How to get rid of
•    How do I get rid of
•    How do you get rid of
•    How to lose
•    How do I lose
•    How do you lose
•    How to get
•    How do I get
•    How do you get
•    How to stop
•    How do I stop
•    How do you stop
•    learn
•    get rid of
•    fix
•    remove
•    prevent
•    cure
•    quit
•    lose
•    get
•    eliminate
•    restore
•    stop

You can also use the Google Keywords Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal), just make sure you uncheck “Use Synonyms” as you only want exact matches.

Discovery keywords are a great way to find what people are looking to do, solve, or accomplish.

Finally, I like to capitalize on the “low hanging fruit.” That is, it’s always much easier to sell a similar product to one that’s already selling well than to try to enter a market cold. If you research your potential competitors up front, you’re going to get a pretty good idea as to how well they’re doing, both in terms of checking their traffic rankings by Alexa (http://www.alexa.com) and Compete.com (http://www.compete.com), as well as their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads in Google, Yahoo, and MSN (at a minimum). We’re going to cover that in the next post.

Start working to find yourself a profitable niche!

Being one of the first marketers to jump on a hot niche market can mean a lot of money to you online. Also, being able to choose a good one can make the difference between success or failure. Since finding a good niche market is so important to your online business I have put together this list of 7 places you must have in your toolbox when looking for a market to tap into.

You may already know about some of these, but I am sure there are a few you hadn’t heard about yet.

1. Yahoo! Buzz – Shows you the top stories and the top stories for each week. You can also browse different niches like Health, Business, Entertainment, etc. to find the hottest stories for that week.

2. About.com – Be A Guide Section – You may be wondering why I would include this on here. About.com is a huge content rich informational website with experts which are also known as guides being the ones providing the content. Well, About.com is always looking for new guides and new hot topics to expand into, so a good way to find some potentially hot niches is to look at the categories they are seeking guides for. That means that their researches have found these to be hot topics, so they are looking to hire someone to write about this topic.

3. Search.com – Top Searches – It offers a list of the 250 top search terms. Browse through this list and you may come across a hot niche.

4. Amazon.com Bestsellers – This place offers you more than just book bestsellers, but it shows you their top sellers for each category that you select from the left hand side. This can give you an excellent idea for a new niche website to create. You can’t go wrong with data reported from a giant like Amazon.com

5. Google Hot Trends – Shows the top 100 hottest searches. It updates every few minutes so check this website often, so you can be on top of a big news break.

6. PriceGrabber.com Most Popular – Check out the most popular products purchased from PriceGrabber.com.

7. Popular Delicious Bookmarks – Find the most recent and popular bookmarks. If a lot of people bookmark it, than it is a good indicator that niche is a good one to go after.

Once you use these sources to find a potential niche market, it is good to use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find additional keywords in that niche, and to narrow down on possible additional search phrases as well. Keep in mind that if you are on a brand new and really hot niche there may be very little from keyword research tools. To learn more about using this tool read my post about using Google’s free keyword research tool.