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Niche Market Research – How To Find Profitable Niches To Plunder!

By keith on Monday, June 14th, 2010 | No Comments
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One of the more enjoyable tasks for me as a marketer is niche market research. ( I know, I know; Mom and Dad said the same thing!) It’s perhaps just the fun of digging around and discovering hidden little markets you can target that is exciting.

So much of the niche marketing business model involves technical aspects like setting up blogs, sites and writing supporting content, as well as all the promotion that goes with it, that when you get to go on a treasure hunt, it’s a welcome break.

To manage good niche market research, set aside some time, a clear mind, and perhaps some tools. This kind of keyword research can be done for free, and indeed that is where most of us start. However when you want to scale this in any meaningful way, you’re going to need some power tools.

But for now, let’s look at how we can find profitable niches  for free!

The first thing to decide is on a market. Many times you hear  people tell you to market your passion. Well, if you’re building niche sites for a living, very soon you’ll be out of passions! I’d personally rather focus on giving hungry markets what they are looking for! Health, wealth and relationships will always be at or near the top of the list as far as consumer demands, so start there. Some great places to find niche markets include looking at Amazon, eBay and Google Trends. Each has features that will tell you what’s hot now, an in the case of Amazon, even offer you affiliate solutions to boot!

Once you’ve found a market, (and hopefully a product you can sell within that market) we want to dig down and find keyword phrases that are getting a decent amount of traffic, but are not overly competitive. For me this means at least 1000 searches a month, and less than 100,000 competing pages. Your numbers may be different. You can pry this info out of free tools from Google, or other free sources online. Or, if you don’t feel like spending weeks doing that much work, give either Market Samurai or Micro Niche Finder a try. Both give you more useful information than you can possibly use, and in minutes.

Beware of spending too much time researching and not enough time putting your plans into action. Understand that nothing happens until something moves!

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Keyword Research

By keith on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 | 4 Comments

If you’ve ever had to embark upon a keyword research project for your sites and campaigns, you know exactly how painful and sometimes bewildering it can all be. What’s the best way to do it? Who’s right? How much is enough? What if it doesn’t work? What’s a “buyer’s keyword”?

All valid questions, and ones that do need answers. Let’s take a quick look at several aspects of keyword research, and hopefully provide you with some of the answers today!

So What Is Keyword Research?

Basically it’s a compilation of keyword phrases for which you’d like to optimize your site, content, or for paid marketing campaigns. These keywords will enable you to be found for the words that best represent your plans and visions for your sites or ad campaigns. There are many ways to accomplish this task. You can use free tools available on the internet, paid tools, outsourcing, brainstorming, or a combination of all of these. Checking your own server logs is never a bad idea either. You want to be aware of what searchers are typing into find you now!

Many people start off with the free Google Adwords External Keyword Tool. This returns many results with search counts that will give you a good general idea of what is popular and what is not. After finding some possibilities here, you’ll want to head over to A Google Search box and see how many pages are optimized for these terms. This will give you a basic idea of the competition and difficulty of the keywords being considered. For a free guide on how to do this download My Take On Basic Keyword Research.

Keyword Research Strategies

Here are some points to keep in mind while performing your keyword research.

  • Think like a searcher. What would you type in for a search of this nature?
  • Don’t go for overly competitive phrases for your primary keywords right away. Build up to them!
  • Don’t choose obscure, little searched-on phrases either. You’re after traffic, remember!
  • If you have a lot to do, invest in a tool to help you. You can take forever doing it the free way.
  • See what keywords your competitors are targeting, and see if you should be too!
  • Break your keywords down into manageable sets, both for SEO and PPC.
  • Target brand names and model numbers where appropriate.

Use Keyword Modifiers

There are a number of keyword modifiers to help in your search. Some of them would be :
Buy, best, top, shop, get, find, purchase, San Diego (use local geo-specific cities and states), cheap, affordable, and anything else that helps you identify a specific search or location.

DIY or Outsource?

This is a tedious and exacting task, that can be detrimental to your sanity. If you’re not up to it, you can outsource at least the initial part of it, and get a bunch to work with. If you do employ an outside firm to do this, make sure you are as sure about them as you can be. You could also choose to set up a staff member with a good tool and let them have at it, thus relieving you of the task but still getting it done in house.

My Favorite Keyword Research Tools

Here are some of the keyword research tools I use all the time. Some do things others don’t. Clearly you don’t need them all! take advantage of any free trials they offer!

MicroNicheFInder – One of the best paid tools out there, MicroNicheFinder gives you a terrific amount of data on niche keywords, market competition, Adwords prices, search counts and great digging functions. They are coming out with a new version on March 22, with a  slew of new features. Highly recommended!!

Traffic Travis – Silly name, cool tool! Great for your overall business as well as for keyword research, Traffic Travis allows you to track, spy, dig deep and analyze a particular phrase in the search engines and more. They have a free version as well as a paid one.

Market Samurai – One of the best internet marketing tools around, it’s more than a keyword tool, though it handles that quite nicely! It’s also great for SEO, tracking rankings, soying on competition and more. They have a free trial.

CashKeywordsPro – The new kid on the block, but destined to perhaps rule over all! A huge amount of functionality, and is geared to affiliate marketing. You can build keyword lists very quickly here. They also have a number of exciting additions coming soon that will be very cool!

There are a number of other keyword tools out there, and many of them are pretty good. Tools like WordTracker, NicheBot, KeywordElite, and KeywordCountry to name but a few.

However you choose to get your keyword research going, just make sure you get it going! Floundering around with unfocused marketing is no way to get found, either in the search engines or in paid search!

Please leave any questions in a comment, and I’ll gladly answer them!

Keith

You want buyers not browsers!

By shelby on Friday, June 20th, 2008 | 1 Comment

Hello!

As a lot of you know, I do a lot of work with Howie Schwartz.  I get the opportunity to work with a lot of internet marketing “gurus” and they each have areas of specialty that they are the industry leaders in.  For Howie, he is DEFINITELY top dog when it comes to Search Engine Optimization, Universal Search and all things relating to dominating in Google.

It’s funny, I actually woke up one day not too long ago and had this realization that I actually understand and KNOW much of this stuff.  A side effect of pulling information from his brain and trying to make some sense of it onto paper. :0)  Anyway, one of the  main reasons I’m telling you this is because I’ve learned a LOT about keyword research.

I know many of you already know about keyword research, or at least think you do!  This is so vital to your social marketing success.  You’re basically basing all of your marketing around your chosen keywords, so you dang well better understand WHICH keywords are bringing you conversions.  Traffic is nice, but conversions are what really matter.

I was at a conference recently and had someone tell me that their traffic stats were unbelievable, but no one was opting in!  I don’t know for sure, but it makes me think they are driving browsers to their site as opposed to buyers.  This topic has made me decide to do a series of posts on this blog about keyword research.  Then I’ll turn those posts into a free report.  So, be sure to check back often to get the next installment!

Today, I mostly wanted to get you to start thinking a little bit differently about keyword research.  There is no magic tool that is going to spit out a list of keywords that are going to give you a marketing blueprint so that you get so many sales you don’t even know what to do with yourself!

There are good keyword research tools available, but you need to think of them like a starting point.  With the way web 2.0 has changed the internet, you really need to be doing some manual additional research to REALLY pull in those buyers you’re looking for.   But we’ll talk more about that in another post!

Today, you have one assignment.  Go through you niche and identify what your “buying phrases” are.  An example Howie likes to use is about selling TV’s.  If you have a website selling TV’s, then you should know that people who are ready to buy are not typing “flat screen tv” or even “Sony Flat Screen TV” into the Serps.

People typing those types of keywords are still browsing.  They’re still trying to decide what they want.  Those aren’t the people you want.  You want the people who have their credit cards out and are ready to buy!  People who are ready to buy have already done their research and have decided what they want.  They are typing in words like, “Samsung TX-T2082 20″ CRT TV“  (Yes, I pulled a random model number from google).

People who are typing in words like that are now just looking for the best deal, warranty, etc.  They are buyers.  They are who you want hitting your website.

Get out your notebook and look around your market/niche and identify what your buyers are typing into Google when they are ready to BUY not BROWSE.

The next segment in this keyword research series will be on the TRUE definition of long tail and why drilling down is so important.  It may not be what you think. :0)

~Shelby

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