Now that you have done your brainstorming, searched for online trends, dug keywords for ideas and used your common sense and lifelong wisdom, you can move to the next phase. The next step for you at this point would be to research your niche and dig into it even further.
Why is researching your niche important
When you research your niche, you strive to answer four essential questions. Finding the answer to these four questions is crucial because it will help you decide whether or not to pursue the niche idea that you currently have. It will also give you a glimpse as to how profitable this niche could be for you.
1. Are there other people who have an interest in your niche? Are there people who have problems or concerns that involve your niche and are on the lookout for solutions to these problems?
2. How big is the market for this niche? How tight is the competition in this market?3. Is there money in this niche? Are people buying and selling within this niche?
4. What products are currently being sold to the people in this niche? Are they being sold successfully? Is it possible for you to sell similar products or do you think you can come up with a better one?
Always keep in mind that you have to answer these four questions whenever you research your niche. Do not try to skip them, as lack of the one answer can hurt your business on a massive scale.
There are many strategies that you can use to research your niche. To make sure that you do not leave any ground uncovered when it comes to your research, you should use as many of the strategies available to you as possible.
One of the most effective strategies for determining if there is money in a niche is keyword research. You did some keyword research when you were trying to search for niche ideas. Now that you have found your niche idea, a new keyword research on it will help you see if this niche idea is worth pursuing.
In the previous section, we did a keyword research on the term "tennis." Let’s look at the Wordtracker results for that keyword again –
You see that fourth on the list is the term "tennis elbow," with 1,223 searches per month. It looks like a good volume for this term, but who knows? There may be some money there, and it may be worthwhile to find out.
So let’s look at "tennis elbow" even further. Searching the term "tennis elbow" on the Google External Keyword Tool yielded this partial result:
The search returned keywords like "pain elbow," "elbow treatment," "treatment tennis elbow," "elbow injuries" and so on. Notice the high volume of global searches? It means there is a market out there for treatments for elbow injuries like tennis elbow.
Of course this is only the starting point of the keyword research and you should definitely seek some more information how to do it properly. It is really one of the most important steps you do.
So now that you have seen that there is a market for products and services addressing treatments for elbow injuries such as the tennis elbow, the next thing you should look at is your competition.
Knowing how stiff the competition is in the niche you have chosen will help you decide if you can enter the foray and come out with the profit.
You can easily sniff out the competition for your chosen niche with a single search on Google.
With the Google External Keyword Tool, you found that there are people doing searches on the term "tennis elbow" and that the volume is decent. Now, open your Internet browser and do a search for the term on the Google engine itself. Make sure to add the keyword in quotes, so that it returns phrase match results.
Once you have the search results page up, there are two things that you need to do.First, you need to look at the number of results that the search has yielded. If it is more than 100,000 websites, then you may be facing market saturation. If it is less than that, then you can probably go for it.
Second, you should check out if there are sponsored listings on the page. You can find these sponsored listings on the top and on the side of the page.If there are a handful of these listings, you may be up for some competition, which is really good. Competition is an indicator that people are spending money on this market, which is exactly what you are looking for – hungry buyer niche.
On the other hand, if there are no sponsored listings, it could mean two things. One is that the niche may be as yet undiscovered, so you can call open season on that. The other is that the niche may be dead because no one is buying products targeting the niche. If that is the case, you should give up and look for another niche.
I must point out – that with so much people willing to make money online, it is really unlikely that the niche is not discovered. Therefore, I recommend to stay away from the niche market with no competition.
You can also use other tools and software to help you check out the competition that you will have on your chosen niche using the keywords that you have picked out.
One such tool that you can utilize in order to get hard numbers on the popularity of your chosen keywords for a specific niche as well as the competition that you may face in this niche when you use these keywords is Market Samurai.
Market Samurai is a piece of software that determines the average searches that a keyword phrase gets daily, as well as the potential daily clicks that a top-ranked website using that keyword phrase can get.
This software can also tell you how many websites globally are using the same keyword phrase, how many clicks the keyword phrase can get if used in a Google AdWords campaign and how many other people are bidding for the same keyword phrase.
More importantly, Market Samurai can estimate how many people are searching the Internet using the keyword phrase to buy a product as opposed to merely looking for information.
Market Samurai is not free software, but you can try it for free for 12 days after downloading and installing it on your computer.These are the numbers that Market Samurai yielded when I searched for the keyword phrase "tennis elbow":
Here is the data that we got from this tool: • The keyword phrase "tennis elbow" is searched for an average of 12,099 times daily.
• The top-ranked website using the term "tennis elbow" can expect a maximum of 5,061 clicks daily (SEOT).
• There are 1,080,000 websites using the key phrase "tennis elbow" globally (SEOC).
• A top-ranked advertiser on Google AdWords using "tennis elbow" can expect a daily total of 102 clicks (AWT).
• There is a 9% chance that the people searching the Internet using "tennis elbow" are looking to buy rather than merely searching for information (OCI).
The third strategy that you should use is targeted Internet browsing. There are websites that you can go to in order to see if your niche idea may be worth pursuing.
First, you can visit discussions and forums where people talk about your niche. You can find forums at Big-Boards.com. You can look for blogs at blog listings like Technorati and BlogCatalog. You can find what people are writing about in EzineArticles.com or you can check out the YouTube videos to see what people are talking about and what products or services they promote.
Believe me, this is not a strategy to make a point in this report. It is a real deal. Those who do this step of research get ahead of all the rest that just are looking for numbers and gimmicks and never dive into the psychology of the target audience.
The fourth strategy that you can use is looking for actual products that are currently being sold in your niche. You can do that by Google search again - to see what products turn up when you search for keywords related to your niche.
If you are interested in selling or promoting physical products, the places you can go to are Commission Junction , Amazon.com , and eBay .The biggest online moneymakers, however, are digital products – information products, like e-books, online courses, podcasts and instructional videos on various subjects.
The best place to search for digital products is Clickbank. Clickbank has thousands upon thousands of digital products that you can promote as an affiliate. If you want to sell your own digital product, you can also make it available to potential affiliates through Clickbank.
Researching the niche in Clickbank is simple. All you need to do is to visit the Clickbank Marketplace. On the Clickbank Marketplace, you will see a list of categories on the left-hand side of the page. You can browse each category to see which products are selling really well.
You can easily check out how well a product sells on Clickbank by looking at its gravity. The higher the gravity of the product is, the hotter you can expect the niche market it targets to be.
You should use all the strategies available at your disposal when you are researching your niche. This is the only way how you can be sure whether your idea will be profitable and will make you money in the long run.