Covered up in research for your Internet business?

I think it is important that you understand what a niche is before you start your search. A niche is simply a section of a major market that you can target. So we’ll use the popular dog training niche for this example. The “dog training” market is a huge market with a large amount of competition. So if you are planning to go into this market you will need a very tight plan for getting your online business in front of your prospects.

However, there are sub markets within the “dog training” market that might be easier for you to target and get a higher ranking for your web site in search engines. Some examples of these smaller sectors or sub niches might be dog training tricks, dog obedience training, dog training schools or dog leash training. Note that in each of these examples, you are narrowing down your market so that you targeted prospects wants are more defined and you can target them easier than you could in the bigger market.

Now let’s get into some numbers and see how this can help you.

If you look at “dog training” on Google you will see that there are over 36 million results listed for that search term. However if we look at “dog leash training” we see that there are 425,000 results in Google for that term. As you can see, we would have a much better chance at getting our web site listed on the first page of google with 425,000 competing pages.

But let’s not get too excited yet!  We have a little more research to do before we can call this a profitable niche for our new Internet marketing business. So let’s take a closer look at the phrase “dog leash training” and see what we are really dealing with even though it looks good at this point.

What I like to do now is determine the real level of competition. How and why do I do that? Because the numbers that we have from google are for a broad match search. I want to know how many web pages I will have to compete with that are actually optimized for the phrase “dog leash training”. The way to do that is to do the same search but this time we put quotes around the phrase. This will give us an exact phrase match and tell us how many competing pages are optimized for that exact phrase.  Now we see that there are only 25,000 pages that google considers optimized for
that exact phrase. This also tells us that we have a very good chance of getting our web page ranked in the first ten results on google to generate
traffic.

Now that we know that we can get a good ranking in the search engines we need to find out if there is enough traffic for this topic to support our business and be profitable.

While we are already on the search page we should take a moment and check out our competition. Look at the first three web sites listed and look at their content, their product or service and their sales message. This will give you a better idea of what you will have to do to be competitive and also give you ideas about what kinds of products you can create.

We also should look at the sponsored ads on the top and right side of the page. These advertisers are paying for each click on their ad so they are making money or they wouldn’t be able to run that ad for very long. Again, we want to look at what they are selling and how they are selling it. This will give us some good ideas about what this niche is spending money on.

Now let’s look at traffic and see if there is enough interest in our “dog leash training” niche to make it worth our time and effort.

So lets head over to the ” seobook keyword suggestion tool” and see what we can find out about this niche. Here we will search the phrase dog leash training and see what comes up. Now we see that the average daily search for our phrase in google is only 11 searches a day. This is not looking like the best niche for your Internet business however, if you combine the other related terms that seobook gives you like “leash training dog” you are looking at well over 100 searches a day which is not bad.

This looks like a niche that might work if your business model is to set up set and forget type web sites. Or you could build a business in this niche and once you have it up and making good profits, you could take on another sub sector in the “dog training” niche. By working in micro niches like this you could over time build a massive presence in the main niche and create a highly profitable Internet business.

Obviously the purpose of this post is not to give you a niche and I used the dog training example because that is the first thing that popped into my head. The purpose is to walk you through a real example of some of the elements of niche research so that you can begin looking for profitable niches for your own Internet business.

One of the tools that I use for many phases of my research is Micro Niche Finder. This tool helps find those low competition sub niches that you can easily dominate in a few clicks of the mouse. It is a massive time saver for me and I highly recommend that you go over and take a look at Micro Niche Finder now.

To your success,
Dale

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The first thing that we need to understand is what a niche is and how to identify a niche. Once you understand that you can begin to move forward with the process of selecting a niche for your Internet business. So with that in mind, here is my definition of a niche market…

Niche definition;
A niche is a market or sub sector of a market that can be defined and targeted. For example, we might say that Internet marketing is a niche. But in reality it is a very big market and encompasses many smaller more defined markets or niches like blogging, traffic generation, copy writing etc.

Now if we look at these sub market examples we could break them down even farther. For example if you type the phrase “website traffic” into “google” and scroll to the bottom we will get some suggestions for additional related phrases. These are phrases that people actually type in to their browser. Therefore these are phrases that could represent some possible niches. (Understand that these are only examples) Let’s take a look at what google gives us…

website traffic report
free website traffic
increase website traffic
targeted website traffic
website traffic generator

Now we have a list of terms that we can begin to work with if we are looking at website traffic as a possible niche. Website traffic is still pretty broad and has a lot of competition with over 65 million competing pages listed in google.

If we look at the term “free website traffic”, we still have over 59 million competing pages in google. That is a whole lot of competition to take on for a new Internet business, especially if you are new to the world of Internet business. Is it an impossible niche to take on, absolutely not!  Will you have to work hard to win a spot in that niche, you bet you will but it can be done.

Just to ease you mind a bit we will take another look at the phrase “free website traffic”, this time with the quotes and we will see that now there are 408,000 competing pages. This tells us that there are 408,000 pages listed on google that are optimized for that phrase. What does that mean to you? It means that if you want to compete in that market and for
that phrase you only really have to beat 407,990 pages to make the first page of google. I know that may seem like a lot but it is doable and much better than 59 million pages.

Where to start?
Now that you understand a niche, where do you start your search for YOUR niche? It’s time to look inside your self. That’s right, look at what you know and what you are passionate about.

Make a list of possible topics and then start looking at the search results for some related searches. Look at the number of competing page (but don’t let that number scare you off). Look at the sites that are listed on the first page of search results. See what they are selling and how they are marketing.

Look at the sponsored ads on the top and right side of the page. What are they selling and is there plenty of advertisers? These Internet business people are paying each time someone clicks on their ad. If they are not making money, they won’t be able to run that ad for very long. This is always a very good indicator of whether a niche is profitable.

Where to look for ideas;
Here are some suggested places that you can look for ideas.

Google Zeitgeist
Allows you check out the hottest search trends at Google Zeitgeist.

Yahoo! Buzz
Look for more hot trends and ideas at Yahoo Buzz.

Lycos Top 50
like Google Zeitgeist, here you can review the latest trends and look for hot topics to explore further

Ebay Pulse
What I will do is select the category first (using the topics I’ve The eBay Pulse site is a great place to start looking at sub-niches.gathered from looking at the previous sites), then look for profitable sub-niches by then selecting a sub-category.

eBay also puts out a PDF report of their hottest categories each month, available at
Ebay Hot Items.

Amazon
Now that you have some ideas of niches or sub niches, 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.

The bottom line in niche selection is to pick a niche that you know or at least have a lot of interest in and one that spends money. You need to enjoy your niche because you will be spending a lot of time writing about it in your new Internet business. You also need to know that your niche is willing to spend money because that is how you
will get paid through your new Internet business.

To your Internet success,
Dale