With the recent explosion in niche marketing blogs, some corners of the web can have some pretty steep competition. Because of this, many great sites go unseen and thus do not reach their full potential. You do not have to let this happen to you! By being an intelligent niche blogger, you can almost guarantee success in any topic you decide to dominate. By properly researching the popularity, competitiveness, and profitability of markets you are thinking of entering, you can decide if those areas are worth working in. This article was written specifically to help you gain the basics of effective and efficient niche market research so you can start to build a booming blog empire.
If you have no idea what niche market you may be interested in, you can start by considering areas you already have an interest in. Maybe you have a hobby you have been pursuing for years, and that you're already an expert in. Perhaps you know some topics you always wanted to know about but could never drag yourself around to researching. These are just two ways you can use to brainstorm ideas that you could turn into a blog or website. If you truly have no idea what topics you should consider marketing, then some good places to look at are eBay's pulse page, the Google trends website, or simply walk down the magazine section of your favorite bookstore to look for themes that keep popping up! Once you have a list of 3 to 6 potential topics for your site, you can quickly research the popularity of the niche.
By niche popularity, I mean that you will be determining if related phrases are searched for often enough. There are many great keyword research tools available, and some of the best are free. I personally use Google's keyword tool since Google is the king of the search engines. You will enter your main topics one at a time and look to see how many related phrases are searched for each month. Different niche bloggers will use different numbers, but phrases can generally be considered popular enough to target if they have at least 300 to 500 searches per month. The point of doing this is that the phrases are ones you will potentially write blog posts or website pages about to give your readers original, useful content to read. Determine if your topic has 30 to 50 popular phrases. If not, toss that idea and move onto the next one in your list.
Once you have narrowed your list down a bit by eliminating ideas that don't reach the popularity threshold, you determine if the rest are too competitive or not. The most often used technique once again harnesses the power of Google (and is free too). Search each of the 30 to 50 phrases within quotations (e.g. "your phrase") and see how many results show up. You want this number to be as low as possible. Try for less than 100,000 to 150,000 competing sites, but even lower is better. Some experts recommend accepting up to 200,000 competitive sites, but I like to target markets that have as few competitors as possible. If most of the phrases in your niche market research come up below this limit, your topic has passed the first two experiments. If not, then throw that idea out and move on.
The last important feature is the profitability of the niche topic. One way of testing this is to do a few searches on Google and look at the number of "sponsored ads that pop up. If there are a bunch of advertisements, then this niche market probably has a lot of potential to it. Other methods that can be used involve looking for related Amazon products or ClickBank items that you can sell. Alternatively, you can check eBay for auctions that people researching your topic would likely want to buy. These are all products you can place on your site and earn affiliate commission from.
There you have it - a quick, concise guide to doing proper research before you ever start working on a website or niche blog. These steps work! If you remember to do them, you can rest assured that your hard work will most likely pay off and lead to money flowing into your bank pockets.
If you want your niche research to be of any value, you need to know how to make a website that visitors want to read. The best methods all target natural search engine traffic. Sebastian Vandershunt runs a free informational website outlining his progress and techniques used as he builds a niche blogger empire. For more tips to become successful in almost any market, visit http://www.squidoo.com/thenicheblogger |
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