"Find Profitable Niches with Niche Navigator"

How to Conduct Research and Uncover Profitable Online Niches.

Unless you already have a great idea on the table, chances are you will need to spend some time looking into what types of products and services you can successfully market. In order to accomplish this, you will need to conduct some investigation into what is already being offered in the way of Internet marketing campaigns, and where you might be able to slip in and fill a niche somewhere in that great big business picture. This investigation is commonly referred to as Market Research.

Here are some tips on where to research niche markets that might be desirable to you, as well as how to find places to launch your marketing efforts.

If you are starting fresh and looking for your first idea for an effective marketing campaign, the best place to begin is with yourself.

What do you like? What types of products are important in maintaining your standard of living? What types of services or goods would make life a lot easier for you, if you had access to them? How much are you willing to pay for these goods or services?

Spending some time searching your own wants and needs may yield some interesting concepts for niches that you can investigate online, and see just how much attention is given to those sorts of products.

Another method is to simply sit down with a piece of paper and make a list of ten subjects that some to mind without going into any really deep thought processes. The list will probably be somewhat random, although thinking of one subject may immediately draw your mind to a related subject.

Don’t fight the flow or spend any time second-guessing the subjects that come to mind. Write them down and don’t waste time thinking they are silly or inappropriate. There will be plenty of time to evaluate the subjects later on.

As a third source of inspiration, go out with friends, but take along a small note-book. As different subjects come up in conversation and catch your ear, make a quick note. One or two word phrases should do the trick nicely. The idea here is to get some ideas for markets to explore, based on what types of issues come to mind among people you know.

While none of these methods are particularly scientific, they can yield some interesting topics to research. Don’t reject any of the ideas out of hand, until you spend some time online and see where the subjects lead you.

Concepts that may seem completely off the wall or worth absolutely nothing may turn out to be gold mines. If research indicates that the subject is a dead end, then at least you have eliminated one possibility and saved yourself the trouble of pursuing that option at a future date. On the other hand, you may be surprised with what you find.

Using these lists of words or subjects that you have compiled, head for the Internet and start doing some digging around. The first thing you want to ascertain is how much interest there is associated with that particular word or phrase. One of the easiest ways to get a handle on this sort of thing is to use word tracking search engines online. There are several well-known ones that are very easy to use.

All you basically do is type in your word or phrase and let the program search the entire web for results. What will happen is that the system will return a list that contains not only incidences of the word or phrase that you entered, but also expanded phrases that include that same word or phrase. You also get an idea of how many sites around the Internet contain text with that word.

This can be a great way to qualify the subjects and see if there is a large amount of interest in a given subject and related topics or information. A lot of hits means that you may want to look further into that subject as a possible foundation for a marketing campaign that is related to that word or phrase.

For example, if one of the subjects that came up on your lists happened to be “dog,” and you find that the word returns close to a million hits on its own, then you may have found a broad subject to explore. Looking down the list, you may find that “dog house” and “dog training” returned a sizable number of hits, as did “dog treats.” With just a little digging, you have uncovered three potential services or products to target.

Moving one step further, you can explore each of these marketing subjects a little deeper by clicking on the word or phrase and canvasing the actual returns. Here, you may begin to see a pattern among the hits that bubble to the surface of the search engines.

This can help you to further refine your idea of what to market. For example, if you notice there are a lot of these that have to do with making a particular product at home, you may begin to think in terms of marketing home assembly kits related to that subject. Perhaps the home assembly requires the use of certain tools.

You may be able to set up a marketing campaign to sell those tools at a competitive price. Perhaps you happen to have some expertise with building those sorts of home projects. Put your knowledge to work, create some easy to follow plans, and market them to do-it-yourself types.

Keep in mind that if you see a phrase with relatively few hits, that does not automatically eliminate it from the running. For example, if you notice that the return for “dog houses online” only yielded two hundred hits, take a moment and look at the actual title tags. You may find that people are looking to buy kits for doghouses online, and that becomes the focus of your new marketing campaign.

One important thing to keep in mind is that you need to try this technique on multiple word tracking programs, since the search criteria used by each system may be a little different. For example, some programs will return an average number of hits per day, while others will focus on the average hits per month. Also, the Internet is an ever growing monster. If you are not quite sure about the potential of a marketing idea, but do not feel comfortable abandoning it completely, move it back down your list – for future reference. A year or two down the road, the results may be very different.

One thing to avoid is trying to repeat the same old tired process that is already being used by hundreds of thousands of other Internet entrepreneurs. Just as with brick and mortar businesses, competition can be fierce on the Internet. What you want is to look for a market that still has some potential to grow, so you are not constantly engaged in exchanging a limited bank of customers with a thousand other marketers.

Choosing to zero in on topics that appear to have some widespread interest on the Internet, but don’t seem to have much in the way of marketing sites that actually address those topics specifically, is a very good bet when it comes to establishing yourself in a niche market.

Of course, there are all sorts of E-books and software programs that are supposedly geared toward finding profitable niche markets. While some of them do contain a few good ideas, the fact is that free resources on the Internet can often yield the same ideas, and sometimes approaches that are just as good, if not better.

Before you spend any money on any type of products, check around various web sites for free ideas on finding niche markets, as well as visiting the free word tracking web sites. Chances are you will find plenty of information that will keep you busy for quite some time, and will likely provide you with at least a half dozen solid leads on potential niche markets to launch your marketing efforts.

Conclusion.

Keep in mind that there is no such thing as an idea that is too crazy to look into. You may find that going with something that is completely off the wall will lead to some interesting concepts of where you can fill a need and encounter a relatively small amount of competition at first.

Let your mind go wild, then use online resources to qualify those wild ideas. In a short time, you may be well on your way to launching your first successful Internet marketing campaign.

"Find Profitable Niches with Niche Navigator"

The internet marketing process must always start with research. Before you do anything at all, you need to identify a niche, then find a product or a service to promote within that niche. Obviously, having your own product to sell is ideal but, since you are reading a basic guide to getting started with internet marketing, I will assume you don’t have your own product yet. That’s fine, we will start with some affiliate marketing to get the ball rolling and when we have some cash in the bank the time will be ripe for creating a unique product.

The time will come when you can juggle 35 or 40 campaigns but take it slow and follow the bouncing ball and we will have that first few hundred in your pocket lickety-split. The first couple of hundred is the hardest. Once you have reached that level it is fairly easy to ‘ rinse and repeat ‘ your way to waking up with a smile every single day. In short, it’s all well and good to have a goal, but keep your expectations reasonable.

People will invariably offer you a hundred ways to make thousands of dollars every week, but if you believe that is a reasonable expectation, you will be disappointed. I am NOT promising to make you a millionaire overnight, if that is the promise you were after then go log in somewhere else.

Okay, back to reality, let’s give some thought to what you would like to promote. You, ideally, should make a list of 6 subjects that interest you and research them one at a time. You don’t need to be an expert in the field, anything that you have an interest in will quite possibly work, but we need to research it first to ensure there is a market of hungry buyers.

At this stage I am looking to illustrate the importance of focusing on your chosen topic because you will soon be tempted with every distraction imaginable to sway you from the path. You will be offered tools to help make the job easier and training courses that promise the world. I beg you not to buy into any of it. We are here to learn the basics at this stage, not buy a heap of products that will inevitably only serve to gather digital cob-webs.

Now you could go straight to places like Clickbank and ClixGalore, while there is nothing wrong with these companies ( and we will be using them soon enough ), they will require you to sign up for an account before you can go into details. I would prefer you don’t do that yet because there are a couple of secrets that I would like to pass on to you first regarding affiliate names and links. Let’s slow down and find a little direction first.

As usual Google is a fairly good starting point for research. Open up your Internet browser and you will see a menu just inside the viewing window in the upper left corner. The option on the right side of this list is”more”, click it and then click “even more” and select “directory”. You are now faced with a page of categories, these are known as “general markets”. Then, if you click on a general market of your choice, you can drill down and find more specific markets within that category, enabling you to gauge their popularity and income potential.

As an example I’ve chosen “health”, followed by “nutrition”, because the weight loss and dieting market is a very popular one right now. However, as I go in I notice 8 sub-categories, 2 of which I would disregard immediately because of high numbers of opposing sites. A noticeable sub-category from the 6 remaining is “cholesterol” with only 69 opposing listings. That may sound like a lot until you dig down a little further and find that only 3 of those sites Google considers to be a “high-quality” site and worth checking out. That, to me, is a niche opening worth looking into further.

Now you should go to Google Trends and take note of the volume of searches for your chosen subject:-

• Is it consistent?
• Are there high volumes of searches?
• Are these searches in a country you can target?

All these types of questions are going to affect how well you can target this particular niche.

To look into it further you would run the same “drilling” operation through Yahoo ( www.dir.yahoo.com and www.answers.yahoo.com ), Amazon.com, Bing.com, Alta Vista, and as many other places as you can find. But don’t stop at search engines, try forums to see what people are talking about in the niche you are researching. What about magazines – are there many magazines published in this niche? Check the article submission sites, perhaps somebody else has recently noticed the same hole in the market and published hundreds of articles in an effort to drive potential customers to their site. While this is not the end of any possibilities for you in that niche, you do need to be aware of what your competitors are doing. A handful of articles driving customers to 1 site is no problem, but 1,000 new articles driving customers to a dozen new sites may be a bit more difficult to combat for somebody new to the game.

Ebay is good for research also because your leg work is mostly done for you. There are so many resources on eBay that you could literally spend hours there digging up useful information. One very useful resource can be found by signing into your own account and clicking on “My eBay”. (If you don’t have an eBay account, you can create one here:- Ebay [Note: I am not an affiliate of Ebay and receive no money or credit if you use this link.]

Once there, you should see the search bar at the top of the screen, so type in the keyword for the market you’re researching. It will now show you the current auctions running on that particular keyword. Now, if you look at the left-hand side of the screen, you’ll notice a search menu. Scroll down this menu until you see a tab that says “completed listings”. This will bring back a list of items for auctions that are finished. This is really useful data because it actually shows you what products are being sold, and for how much, in the niche that you’ve selected. You can also check eBay’s What’s Hot report. This can be found on eBay Pulse and shows which categories and products are performing well. This is updated on a daily basis and you can find it at:- Ebay Pulse [Note: I am not an affiliate of Ebay and receive no money or credit if you use this link.]

Another good tip to help with your niche choice is a simple Google search engine query, but this should be done after your chosen niche passes the other tests. I will explain – After researching ‘cooking recipes’ with a view to helping a friend kick off her new site, I found that although there were more than 400,000 monthly searches for recipes ( particularly specialist recipes like ‘pudding recipes’ and ‘soup recipes’ )it occurred to me that this was a group of “searchers” and not “buyers”. The cooking recipe niche is very low on sales because, if you look hard enough, you can get almost any recipe for free. So, after you have almost decided on your niche, do this one last search. Open your browser and do a simple Google search for your niche – in my case it was cooking recipes – and take note, near the top of the window, of (a)how many search results and (b)then have a look down the right side at the Adwords ads for that niche. When I researched ‘cooking recipes’ I found over 29,500,000 search results and only 4 Adwords ads. This is a red flag to me and tells me immediately that the ‘cooking recipes’ niche is probably not going to be profitable for a newbie.

This highlights the importance of competition. You need competition, good quality competition, to succeed. Don’t let competition scare you, learn from them. Check out the websites of your competition and see what they are doing. Some will have killer headlines, others will have awesome graphics, some will capture email addresses and some won’t ( stupid, but we will cover this later ). Learn by all these sites because what you need to create, in order to beat them at their own game, is a combination – all the best aspects of each site combined to make a better site.

Okay, now you have an idea of what is required to research a niche – go to it, and when you honestly believe you have enough information to make a decision on which niche you will follow, you can start on your keyword research.

Ensure that you have adequately completed this step before moving on to the next step. There is no rush, work at your own pace. The ground work you do now will set you up for the future, if you do mediocre research now then mediocre success is a reasonable expectation.

Stay focused and remember to choose 1 subject to focus on at a time.