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Niche Market Research

Made Easy

Niche Market Research Made Easy

Introduction

Choosing markets to target with your websites is one of the few parts of internet marketing that has been around since the early days, and will be around for as long as people are marketing on the internet. Before you worry about driving traffic, getting clicks on your ads, getting opt-ins to your email list or any of the other multitude of things you do with a new website, you need to decide what market you're going to target. And this is a stumbling block for a lot of people. That's partly why you see so many people with websites on the same topics - acne treatment, natural health cures, debt relief. And of course the big one - internet marketing. A lot of these people get stuck on trying to decide on a market, so they just pick one that they see other people using. So there winds up being a lot more competition in those markets, and a lot of those sites make little to nothing every month. In this report, I'm going to share my methods for finding markets that will make money, and identifying keywords that will make it quicker and easier for you to start getting traffic. Let's dive right in…

Picking Profitable Markets The first step in identifying your niche market actually has very little to do with the internet. There aren't any special research tools necessary, aside from a tool that every one of us already has - your brain. There are lots of tools that will help you identify good keywords, find suitable domain names and all the other research that goes into a site. In fact, I'm going to talk about one that I use in a bit. But before you worry about any of that stuff, you need to decide what markets you want to target.

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When I pick a market, there are a couple of criteria that I look for:

1. Buyers 2. Physical goods

The first item - buyers - is pretty obvious. You want to pick a market where there are buyers. This may mean that it's not a market with a lot of people looking for free information, and it could mean a market where the buyers are able and willing to spend money. Health markets are popular for a lot of internet marketers, but they often don't meet the first criteria very well. A lot of these types of markets, such as acne treatment, snoring relief, how to stop smoking, and so on, are mostly people who are looking for free information. There might be a lot of infoproducts on Clickbank and other such sites that you can promote as an affiliate, but frankly most of the information in those products is available for free on other websites. Plus, in most of these markets when someone solves their problem, that’s it – they don’t need any more information. This makes it harder to offer them other products on the backend. As far as being willing and able to spend money, an obvious example is a market that targets 13 year olds. While they might be extremely willing to buy, chances are they don't have a credit card and can't pull the trigger without going through their parents. That's not a market I'd want to attack either. As far as physical goods, I prefer to pick markets that have actual physical products for sale. There are several reasons for this. First, those buyers aren't going to be able to find what they're seeking for free. So right there, you've increased the chance of actually converting a sale since they don't have a free alternative like they might on Clickbank or with some other information product. Second, with physical goods, you can target "buying keywords" that indicate that the searcher is very close to making a buying decision. If you have a good conversion funnel in place on your site, your chances are quite high that your site



visitor will take an action that ultimately pays you money, whether an affiliate purchase, opting into your email list or even an Adsense click. The other thing I like about physical goods is that you can leverage your sites into a "network" of related markets. This can give you more strength in the search engines, and you can cross-promote stuff to your visitors or the people on your email lists. Let's look at an example to see how this stuff fits together in "real life"... You might build a website about bathroom fixtures - sinks, showerheads, toilets, etc. Not the sexiest topic, I'll admit. But if someone is searching for information about new fixtures for their bathroom, there's a good chance they're building or remodeling an existing bathroom. And they are going to buy those fixtures one way or the other.

Why not help them find what they need, and make some money for yourself in the process?

There are a ton of buying keywords in a market like bathroom fixtures. Brands like Crane and American Standard all have various models of fixtures, and the combination of brand names and model numbers are typically good buying keywords, because people searching for them already know what they want to buy. But once you get your bathroom fixture site up and running, where do you go next? How about...

Kitchen appliances Bedroom furniture Living room furniture Garage remodeling Yard and garden maintenance Landscaping And so on...



There are a ton of home improvement topics you could target, tying them all together into a larger network of sites. This is just an example, of course. You could do the same with fitness equipment, computer equipment or any number of other physical goods. And yes, you could even do the same thing with a market that's more information-based, like health for example. I just prefer to pick the low-hanging fruit, where there’s less effort needed for higher returns.

Finding Market Ideas If you're really not sure where to start, there are a couple of places that are great for finding market ideas. The first is your local shopping mall. Just wander through the mall and really look at all the stores that you normally just walk past. Think in terms of the market and products they sell instead of what you are interested in personally. Another great place to find ideas is home improvement stores like Home Depot or Lowes. They have a ton of different product categories, and if you just wander up and down the aisles with a pen and notebook, you'll probably leave with enough market ideas to last you for a couple of years. Home improvement stores are one of my favorites, in fact. I’ve got a notebook full of ideas that I turn to whenever I’m setting up a new site. And the great thing is, a lot of these markets are ones where people spend a lot of money, so the revenue potential is much better. The last place I go for inspiration when I'm looking for new ideas is my local bookstore. The magazine section, in particular. I'll grab a magazine on a topic that I don't normally read about, and just scan through it. I look at the ads, mainly, to see what kind of stuff is being sold to people interested in that topic. Between these three sources of ideas, I guarantee that you'll never be at a loss for ideas. You'll only be at a loss for time to get them all implemented!



After You've Picked Your Market Once you've picked the market(s) that you want to target, now it's time to get back on the computer and do some actual research work. The first place I normally head is Google Trends. The first thing I want to find out is how seasonal the market is. There's nothing wrong with a seasonal market, in fact they can be quite lucrative, but if you're building a new website in January, and the peak season for the market is January to March, you're probably not going to get much traction before the busiest time of the year is over. If you spend the next six months promoting the heck out of that site and not seeing a lot of traffic, you might decide it's not worth the hassle and give up before the peak season hits again. So you want to know this stuff up front. Let's look at an example... The fitness and "lose weight" market tends to get more traffic in December and January, when people are thinking about the new year and making resolutions to lose weight. So if you're thinking about building a site about elliptical machines, you can search for "elliptical machine" on Google Trends which will give you a chart like this one:


http://www.google.com/trends


As you can see, the traffic peaks through December and January every year. In this particular market, you'll see traffic all year long but it will spike considerably over these two months or so. Which means you might make a large percentage of the total annual revenue on the site over the course of a couple of months. Another market that's a little more extreme in its seasonality is Halloween costumes. You can see in this Google Trends chart that the traffic peaks in September and October, then dies out almost entirely after Halloween, and through most of the year.

Just be aware if you're going to work in a seasonal market, you'll need to plan accordingly so you're not spinning your wheels at the wrong time of the year.



Keyword Research Once you've identified your market, it's time to start doing some keyword research. There are a bunch of tools out there for doing keyword research and competitive analysis. Some are better than others, and you'll find people who swear by or at every one of them, so you'll probably want to do your own comparisons to see which one will suit your needs. But before you even look at keyword tools, especially if you don't have the money to invest in them yet, you can do a lot of the work they do using free tools. In fact, a lot of the keyword research tools that you buy use free tools like the Google Keyword Tool to gather their data. They just automate some of the steps to make it quicker and easier for you. There are three free tools that I use most of the time when doing research:

1. Google Keyword Tool 2. Google Search 3. SpyFu

There are a couple of others that I use occasionally, but let's look at these main three first. The Google Keyword Tool is my primary source of keyword information. It will give you a list of keywords related to a particular "seed" keyword, along with both global and local monthly search volume.

These are keywords that people are actually searching for, straight from the source.

Now, if you've read anything about Google's Keyword Tool in the past, you may have seen people who criticize it and accuse Google of using misleading numbers on it. Personally, I don't think this is the case. But whether it is or not, at some point you need to stop analyzing stuff and start doing stuff. I've had good results with


https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://www.google.com/

http://www.spyfu.com/


the data I've researched using Google's tools, so I'm happy with what they provide. Let's use one of our previous examples with the Google Keyword Tool - elliptical machines. When I search for "elliptical machine" here is the result I get, sorted by Global Search Volume:

Now, as you can see, there are a lot of pretty generic search terms in there, with huge monthly search volume:

Exercise - 6,120,000 Pilates - 2,240,000 Bodybuilding - 1,830,000



etc. These are related to elliptical machines, but not on a direct level. Obviously people who want to buy an elliptical trainer are interested in exercise, which may mean they're interested in Pilates or bodybuilding, but these aren't the types of keywords we want to find. If nothing else, they're incredibly competitive and are not buying keywords, so you would have to work a LONG time to rank for them, and even then they might not make you a lot of money. So let's narrow down the search results in the Google Keyword Tool. We're going to open up the Advanced options and set a few things that will help narrow down our results.

Under advanced option, we're going to select the following:

Locations & language: United States / English Filter keywords: Global monthly searches >= 1000 Filter keywords: Global monthly searched <= 10000

To add the second keyword filter, just click the Add another link under the first line.



If you're targeting a market where the bulk of the traffic comes from outside the United States, you can change the location to whatever is appropriate. But the majority of traffic in most markets comes from the US, so I generally use those numbers in my research. You should also change the "Match Type" from broad to phrase, in the left-hand column (near the bottom).

This will help weed out some of the less-relevant keywords. Let's look at the results with these filters in place…



As you can see, the results are much more targeted now. There are still keywords there that aren't directly related to elliptical machines, such as "multi gym" and "fitness exercises" but these can often be useful for "theming" your site so we don't want to get rid of them entirely. You can adjust the filters to different numbers if you want, but I typically don't go under 1000 searches per month, simply because when you get down into the lower number of searches there often isn't enough traffic volume to make it worth the effort. And keywords that get more than 10,000 searches a month tend to get a lot more competitive. There's nothing wrong with targeting these once you've got a site up and running, with some history behind it, but trying to get traffic for more competitive keywords within a short period of time isn't going to work out so well. The next step is to identify the relevant keywords from the list, and do some competitive research on them.



I generally start at the bottom of the list, with the keywords that have fewer searches every month. This obviously doesn't give you the highest number of potential searches, but you're more likely to identify low-competition keywords here than you are with the top of the list.

Competitive Research There are two components to doing competitive research when picking your keywords:

1. Number of competing sites overall 2. Number of competing sites that are actually using SEO for those terms

The overall number of competing sites is important, but in a lot of cases the vast majority of those sites aren't actually optimizing their site or pages to try to rank for them. In many cases, this means you can target keywords that have more "apparent" competition. To research the total number of competing sites, go to Google.com and search for your keyword in quotes. eg. To find the number of competing pages for the keyword phrase "nordictrack elliptical" you would search for the following:


http://www.google.com/


Notice that the search term is in quotations. This will only return results with that specific combination of keywords in the results. So a site with "Nordictrack elliptical" on a page would show up in the results, but a site with "Nordictrack makes elliptical machines" wouldn't, because the exact phrase isn't there. Now, people rarely search this way so you're not going to be trying to rank for the phrase in quotes, but what you want to know is how many competing pages are out there. In this particular case, there are about 18,300 competing pages - you'll see that number under the search box (it's highlighted in the above screenshot).



When I'm doing competitive research, I typically look for 50,000 or fewer competing pages. The lower the number of competing pages, the easier it's going to be to rank for that term obviously, so if you can find something in the sub-10,000 range that's even better. The second metric I use is the number of competing pages that are actually optimized for the keyword phrase. While a lot of pages might include the phrase in the content of the page somewhere, if someone is optimizing for that keyword phrase specifically, it will generally be in the title tag for the page. To find all the competing pages that use that exact keyword in the title tag, use the ALLINTITLE: search in Google, along with your keyword phrase (again in quotes). Here's how it looks:

You can see here that we are down to 985 competing pages that are actually using the "nordictrack elliptical" keyword phrase in their title tag. So while there are almost 19,000 pages that include the keyword phrase somewhere on the page, there are less than 1,000 that are actually optimizing for it.

As surprising as it may seem, there are still a lot of keywords that have a good number of searches and very little



competition. So don't be discouraged if you don't find something on your first attempt. Keep digging, and chances are good that you'll find some real gems.

Adsense-Related Research If you're planning to monetize your site using Adsense, this is when you would want to use SpyFu as part of your research process. SpyFu will give you a rough estimate of the value of the clicks in Adwords, so you can get some idea of how much you're going to get per click for Adsense ads. This is hardly written in stone, but it lets you compare one keyword to another. Using our "nordictrack elliptical" example, SpyFu is reporting the click costs range between $1.08 and $8.63.

As a rough average, you can expect to get about 50% of the amount SpyFu reports for your Adsense clicks. But that is a rough estimate, and there are a lot of other factors involved so you'll never be guaranteed that it's accurate. The value of this information isn't so much in knowing roughly what you might get per click though. It's being able to compare multiple keywords to see which ones are more valuable.


http://www.spyfu.com/


If you have a list of keywords that you've done your competitive research on, you can run them through SpyFu to see which ones are more likely to have a higher CPC. Those are the ones you should be focusing on first.

Domain Name Research The final step in this market research process is to check and see what kind of domain names are available that include the keywords in the list you have generated. At the moment, Google seems to give more weight to sites that have the specific keyword in the domain name, at least on longer-tail keywords. This could change anytime, of course, but right now building a site with an exact match domain can get your site ranked and generating traffic quite quickly. To check the availability of keyword-based domains, I like to use the GoDaddy bulk registration tool. You can copy and paste your keyword list into it, check the extensions you want to look for, and it will tell you which ones are available. Here is what it looks like:

When you copy & paste your keywords, you'll need to remove the spaces between words because you obviously can't include spaces in domain names. I just paste my keyword list into a text editor, like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on the Mac, and use search & replace to replace all spaces with nothing.


http://www.godaddy.com/domains/searchbulk.aspx

http://www.godaddy.com/domains/searchbulk.aspx


Next, paste that list into the GoDaddy bulk registration tool and then check off whatever domain extensions you want to consider. I normally pick .com, .org, .net and .info.

Note: The value of .info domains is questionable, but I have had some success getting ranked for exact-match .info domains so I normally check it as well.

After you click the "search" button, GoDaddy will show you which domains are available. Here are the results using our "nordictrack elliptical" keyword:

As you can see, all four extensions are already registered, so there are no exact match domains available for it, at least not with our preferred extension. Note: In this particular example, we're dealing with a trademarked name - Nordictrack. It's always a bit of a risk to register a domain that includes a brand name or other trademark, because the company that owns it could come after you with a cease & desist request to hand the domain over to them. Whether or not you could fight the request, it's probably not something most internet marketers want to deal with. Just be aware that if you register a domain with a trademark in it, you could end up losing that particular income stream at some point down the road.




What to do if none of your keywords are available as exact-match domains? The easiest thing is to add some type of "stop word" to the beginning or end of the domain. So you might search for something like thenordictrackelliptical.com or nordictrackellipticalreviews.com. These still include the exact match keyword in the domain, there's just a word added to the beginning or end. Adding something in the middle of the keyword phrase would result in it not matching exactly, and would more than likely affect your ranking ability. Using stop words like this generally makes it a little harder to rank than having a pure exact-match domain so if at all possible, you should try to find something you can get the exact keyword for. But if all else fails, doing it this way will still work pretty well.

Conclusion Using these methods to choose and research your markets should give you enough ideas to last you for months or even years to come. With some basic promotional techniques, like article marketing, social bookmarking and other basic link building, the sites you build should start getting traffic pretty quickly, and you can start seeing revenue within a few days in many cases. Once you identify the most profitable markets out of your stable of minisites, you can decide whether or not you want to build larger "authority" type sites, link some of your related minisites together, or just keep building more.

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