How I Research a Market for a Niche » Aspects of Home Business Blog

When you’re deciding what you want to market, your niche research is important. Sometimes it’s easy. When I started my first site on medical transcription, for example, it was because I was working in that industry andother moms kept asking me how to get into it. I ended up going broader than that because so many found the requirements to work in medical transcription simply overwhelming.

searching

In that case my early research was simply conversations with people who would be my target market. Lots of moms want real information on working at home.

But other products require different tactics. It’s not often so easy to spot an interesting niche. Fortunately, there are many useful online tools.

Wordtracker is perhaps the most often mentioned. Even it’s free version is a good resource, although to really get into the depths of keyword research you need to pay. You can subscribe for as little as a week, which is $30 as of this writing. There’s a huge difference in what you can do in the paid version versus the free.

I also look at the other websites in your niche out there. The goal is not to copy them, not by a long shot. But looking at the sites that already exist tellsme a lot about my future competition. I’m not only looking at what they do well, but what I could do better.

Having a Google AdWords account is very useful. In areas that pay well, people are likely to pay for advertising. But you don’t have to have an account to use their free external keyword suggestion tool.

If it’s pure power you’re after, however, Keyword Elite is the tool for you. It helps you to analyze your keyword competition in Google, Yahoo, Miva and Enhance. That’s nice if you just want to build a website, but if you’re going to be doing pay per click marketing, it’s vital. This is one of those tools that is worth the investment.

But what makes a niche worthwhile?

It can depend on your goals. I’ve had success with keywords that have only a few thousand searches a month. These aren’t my big earners, but a couple are pretty steady in the $50-100/month range. It’s nothing to sneeze at. This doesn’t work out every time, of course.

But may marketers recommend focusing on keywords that have at least 50,000 searches per month. Keep in mind that this number is total for the main keyword and the extended phrases. A few thousand searches for one version, a few hundred for another, adds up pretty fast.

A key item to remember is that just because someone else has a successful site on a particular topic, with affiliate programs that pay well, doesn’t mean the market will work out for you. Many are expensive and/or difficult to break into. Credit cards, for example. The commissions for credit card approvals are amazing, but it’s a tough industry, even in pay per click. You really have to figure out how to stand out.

Heavy competition is not always a reason to drop a niche. If you can find that way to stand out, or you analyze your competition and realize they’re missing a lot of key areas, you can still make a go of it and succeed. But I wouldn’t recommend targeting the difficult niches until you have some experience.