e-book Description
Unlocking The Niche Code
(How to Research the Moneymaking Capabilities of a Niche)
A Step-by-step Approach to Finding the Best Niches in which to Market a Product or Service
Brought to You by Make Money Today Academy
Unlocking The Niche Code:
When selling a product, a lot of people make the mistake of developing their product first, and then trying to find a market for it. Of course, the process should be reversed.
Find a market first that spends money, then find out what they want and give it to them.
It is certainly easier said than done, but there are a lot of places online where you can do your market research for free. They've done most of the work for you already. You just need to know where to go and what to do to connect all the dots.
Let I show you the process I go through when I'm trying to brainstorm for 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-
To begin with, I check out the hottest search trends at Google Zeitgeist. If I am targeting the US
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. Whatever. 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.
eBay also puts out a PDF report of their hottest categories each month, available at
Now that I have some potential sub-niches to work with, I want to see how much of the market there is there.
Just because of 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.
For example:
First I specify “Books” to search. Then I enter my niche, in this case, “crafts.”
Uh oh. There are WAY too many books returned. This niche is not targeted enough. It is too “mainstream.”
Much better! There are possibilities here.
We now suspect the following:
1) This sub-niche may be targeted enough.
2) This sub-niche may spend money.
Time to scope it out a little further.
We want to be as certain as we possibly can that our niche is focused enough but big enough, and that the people in that niche spend money.
So next I head over to the Overture Resource Center
Then I enter my niche and see how many times that keyword and all related keywords were searched in the previous month.
I like to see at least 10,000 searches for all keywords combined, but not more than, say, 50,000 or so (although I do have profitable niches that have only a few thousand searches at Overture, but they are the exception rather than the rule).
For “latch rug”, you can see that this market is just too small.
Remember that Overture searches are for Yahoo and their partner sites, so to measure the number of searches on Google, I usually estimate between 5 and 10 times this number to come up with Google’s searches. Also, depending on the market, I've sometimes found Overture’s figures somewhat inflated, so bear in mind that the number of actual searches might be lower.
If I’m happy with them number of searches for this potential niche, I next want to see how much pay per clicks (PPC) are going to cost me on Google Adwords.
For that I use Overture’s “View Bids Tool.”
I want to make sure I won’t have to pay more than a dollar or two per click on average, but of course what you can profitably pay for PPC will depend on your product’s selling price and how many you can sell.
Again, at this point, I’m just trying to get a snapshot or pulse of this market.
Plus, the bid process also tells you a little about the moneymaking opportunities of a market. As a loose rule, if the max bid results are between 30 cents and $2.00, it’s a good indicator that people are making money in this market. I call this my “magic window.”
Over $2.00 means that the competition is too fierce for my tastes, but depending on your market and eventual product selling price and demand, it may make sense for you.
To check on the companies that are bidding on my keywords in Google Adwords, I use http://www.googspy.com.
One relative newcomer as a research tool is Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends).
There’s lots of useful information here. You can see that the news volume is synced with the search volume, and several notable news articles are displayed, along with where they occurred on the timeline.
In the lower section, you can see which countries, cities, and languages made the most searches. Be aware that the indicators are normalized, meaning they are adjusted for that region’s population. For example, South Africa U.S. U.S. South Africa
In the upper-right corner of the page, you can switch regions (e.g. if you wanted to check the U.S.
For example, notice below how I changed the time period to a single month. See any cyclic trends there?
You may have noticed that searches for this topic tend to spike every Friday, going into the weekend, and then fall again during the week.
This information may be useful if you are going to advertise with Google Adwords, and you’re launching a firesale or other limited time campaign, because you’ll want to schedule your campaign around one or more of those spikes.
Some markets have different patterns, so it’s useful to be aware of them prior to launch.
Another great use for Google Trends is if you are trying to decide between two different niches. If you enter your search terms and separate two or more with a comma, Google will compare them for you...
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