When people start on their quest to make money online, there’s almost always a period of time when I/you/we might find ourselves bouncing around from one thing to another, trying different tactics, methods, but rarely any strategies.
TACTICS are what make strategies work.
Without a strategy, no amount of tactics will work.
Some money-making strategies for internet marketing:
- Affiliate marketing- sell other’s products
- Sell your own products
- Provide a service ( writing, technical stuff like installing scripts, building websites, SEO services, etc…)
What most people are after though isn’t making their own products or providing services.
What most people want to do is create websites that make money and not have to deal with customer support or creating their own product/service.
Which brings us (finally) to niche research strategies, and finding good niches to set up shop in.
Doing niche research to find profitable markets:
Questions to ask if you don’t know where to start:
- Is there a problem here, and can I deliver a solution (via digital product, hard copy physical product or by way of offering a service) ?
- Is there enough traffic or interested buyers looking for this solution? Offline concerns = researching solutions online research = traffic for particular keywords
- If there ARE hungry buyers in this niche, are they spending money or just curiosity clickers?
- Do I have an interest in this subject matter? Helps if/when you decide you want to write good content
Exploring your niche ideas for profitability and traffic potential
TIP: When I do research into new niches, I usually have at least 3 tabs open on my browser, the reasons for which will be evident as you read further down
There are 2 free tools you can use here to get a good idea on potential traffic and potential profitability
Google Keyword tool -Tab 1 open in browser
As far a search volume is concerned this tool doesn’t provide truly accurate numbers because it also includes (potential traffic volume) numbers from their search partners, and this traffic is only available via other sites and pay per click advertising on those sites.
However, it does give you a good idea on what the most searched-for keywords are and what their potential profitability might be if you use the drop-down menu to Show CPC, which means Cost Per Click. If the “CPC” is 40 cents or above there’s some potential here but “potential” is always a combination of traffic volume and profitability, therefore 40 cents a click is goo dif there’s 6,000 EXACT searches a month for a particular term, as opposed to something that gets 30 searches a month for the exact term.
Using Spyfu -Tab 2 open in browser
If/when you find something that looks profitable because it has high search volume and decent CPC, then your next step should be to see if there are any Pay Per click marketers advertising something for when these terms are searched for.
However, what you really want to know is not just whether or not there are other’s paying for clicks for this term, but how many others are paying for this term, which means you want to know how many advertisers there are for this term currently. Any number above 8 advertisers means there’s potential and profitability for this particular term
NOTE: It’s helpful to remember that niche research is done by analyzing the big picture and how much traffic the most general terms are getting, plus knowing if there are currently solutions being searched for, plus knowing if this niche and its related keywords have already proven profitable as evinced by the CPC costs.
Analyzing your SEO competition:
The third Tab I have open in a browser in for my favorite domain name registrar Namecheap.
When analyzing your SEO competition here’s what you need to take into consideration
The top 15 websites ranking for your chosen keywords/phrases/terms
- Do they have keywords in their domain name?
- Are they authority sites like WikiPedia Amazon, YouTube videos?
- Do the highly-ranked URLS (not main sites) have any PageRank, which is merely indicative of that URL getting traffic nothing more.
- Do the highly-ranked URLs have backlinks pointing to them, if so how many and where from?
NOTE: What those highly-ranked websites (and URLs) are doing for monetization = good profitability options being handed to you here
Determining if you can rank well for the terms you’re going after
The answer to this lies not just in your level of SEO knowledge, but also in what available domain names there are that are a close or exact match to the keywords you’re going to target for a main traffic term. Domain names are still one of the most important elements for ranking well for certain terms.
NOTE: You can still rank well without using keyword-rich domain names, but it just makes life a lot easier if good domain names are available.
The strategy for getting domain names
What I like to do here is have a tab/window open for a domain name registrar while sorting through keywords that get traffic, have high CPC and most importantly of all, are relevant to what I am going to write about.
Since domain names are one of the most heavily weight on-page/on-site SEO factors, I try to find a domain name that very closely resembles or exactly matches some of the high search terms.
In most cases the really good domain names that are exact matches for the top search terms are already taken so what you want to do here is look for domain names that include a combination of some of the top search terms.
For example: The MLM Network Marketing Niche/Industry
I decided to build a network marketing related site last year and started off by doing some searches using “mlm”, and “network marketing” as my base terms.
I sorted the keywords list by most-to-least traffic volume.
Then I went over to my NameCheap browser tab and started searching for available domain names, starting with the most searched for terms which are usually already taken.
A lot of the high traffic terms were taken as exact domain name matches, so I got a domain name that had my main terms/keywords in its name and had some exact matches in it for other terms that got a good amount of searches.
Keep going > Read Part 2 Of Niche Research and Setting Up New Websites
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks, Dan, for organizing your thoughts on this and spelling things out here.
It is good to remember all the steps and to keep in mind there is always more than one way to get the same information or the information that you need. I am learning that the more back doors I open the more information I find. I appreciate your posts.
.-= DonnaB´s last blog ..Mandura GLOBAL News =-.
Thanks for stopping by Donna…
This is the first in what’s going to be a long series of posts, and something I meant to get to a long time ago. The next post is 3/4 written and has more information on niche research, generating keywords lists, setting up websites, blogs etc….
Dan
Dan, I did not know you had a site like this, with all this info you should push it more.
I only found it by the long route, I joined Automated Link Builder and some time after found this link in an email.
Keep up the good work, and thanks for all the info.
Gordon.
Hey Gordon, thanks for stopping by….
This blog used to be my main focus then my SEO blog took over. I’m slowly but surely going back to this blog, to finish up a few series of posts I’d always wanted to do.
Thanks for the (implied) compliment/feedback,
Dan
Thanks Dan for the insight, looking forward to your next post. It’s nice to have a few options to use for the research it takes to build an internet marketing business.
Mick
.-= Mick McCrory´s last blog ..How To Optimize Your MLM List =-.
Thanks Mick Mick
…. there’s really about 50 different places and ways to do niche research, so I find it best to start with a broad idea, and then narrow things down from there, and it always pays to remember that keyword research is NOT niche research
Thanks for the neat summary Dan, that makes the process clearer than I’ve seen it before. Keep up the good work.
Judson
@Judson Lassiter,
Nice to see you again Judson. There’s so many ways to do niche research that it’s easy to get lost in the information, it’s almost like pro-actively seeking TMI ( too much info) to do anything with.
Amazon’s API, Ebay Pulse, Magazines.com, major discussion groups, etc… there’s really a ton of places to get information from, so brod, birds-eye view is helpful when doing niche research. Studying the minutiae of kw lists is for KW research.
Thanks for stopping by,
Dan
P.S. congrats on your Saints winning the SuperBowl!
Pats in 2011
Yet another great reason why I’m a subscriber/member here Dan…
Does a keyword rich subdomain on a generic root name rank well?
Be Well!
ECS Dave
.-= ECS Dave´s last blog ..Twitter Business Magic PLR =-.
Hey Dave, good to see you around again. Yes the kw rich subdomain would help but not much more than having a kw rich title. Only reason you’d want to do that sub-domain is if you want it to look entirely different form rest of generic root name site, like if generic root site was a blog and you just wanted a landing page on sub domain then you’d wanna make that totally separate form look and feel and focus of main site.
I do know some guy who won an SEO contest by ranking tops for a 2 word phrase and the phrase was split between the main domain name and the subdomain name, so if the contest was to rank well for the term green umbrellas he made a subdomain called green, on domain name umbrellas green.umbrellas.com