Researching Niche Market Ideas For A Website

These days it is more important than ever to look for niche market ideas when building a website due to the level of competition in search engines. There are many ways of finding a great niche for an online business, this article will explain my favorite ways of finding niche market ideas by using freely available tools or cheap methods.

Firstly some of you may be thinking what is a niche? Well it’s generally a topic, product or area that is targeted to a small amount of people searching for that particular product or thing. Sometimes a web developer can hit lucky and find a niche that actually has a lot of people searching for it with relatively little or no competition. These are golden niche markets, and if you find one be sure to exploit it properly

So lets get down to business. For work at home ideas a niche market website is about the best of them all especially if it is an area of high income. Finding something that is worth promoting either by producing an online store, information site or by lead generation is the first priority. What you need to find is something which offers a good rate of return. This could be a product with high value, or an niche market where advertisers pay good money to be displayed on websites. Here are some ideas of how to find products or information that can deliver good returns.

Using the Google keyword tool is a must. You can just type in general terms and sort them from high to low by the CPC column. Using broad search find a list of words you would be happy writing about or promoting products for, copy and paste them into a text file or excel document. Then check some of these keywords using “exact” search. This feature can be found down the left hand side of the tool as a “checkbox” once you have ran a search. The results will now display exact type ins of a term rather than a broad search. An exact type in might be “niche markets”, but there maybe thousands more broad searches incorporating that term like “how to find niche markets” “niche market ideas” and so on. Ideally you want a term that has a decent amount of type ins and quite a high broad search for long tail terms also.

Then you may want to look through places like commission junction or Amazon to see if there are any products related to the keywords. Make sure any you pick have a decent sale value, or high 7 day CPC in affiliate programs. If other people are making money selling the product there is a high chance you can also if you find a niche keyword to push it through.

Checking the competition within the niche

There are a few decent methods and ratios of finding a niche that is possible to crack. A friend of mine swears by the 2:1 ratio. This means he won’t even bother with a website business idea unless it has less than 2 times the amount of exact searches as competition in Google. As an example, a keyword may have 2500 exact searches per month, he would like to see less than 5000 websites as competition in Google using one of the following methods. Personally I would find it frustrating looking for niche market ideas with so little competition as they are quite rare on terms that have people searching. So using the same methods I tend to look for areas with less than 50,000 site as competition if the term has 1000 – 2000 exact type ins and plenty more broad searches.

Method one. Use quotes around your search term in Google. Using quotes around your search term brings up sites that are using that phrase either within their meta titles, site content or URLs. This is a good guide to actual real competition if you plan to optimize for a certain keyword. The amount of sites in competition are shown as the results underneath. You can give yourself an advantage over the majority of these sites by obtaining a keyword risc domain name, or if there is nothing available, by using the keyword in URLs for 2nd level sections of the site. E.G url.com/niche-keyword-section.html

IMPORTANT! This is not the end of this method. Many people fall down because they think they have found a niche market with little competition at this point. What you need to do now is look through the first few pages of results for the term. What you need to see within the first 4 or 5 pages is a reasonable amount of articles and information pages on free blogging platforms. You are looking for are pages on Squidoo, Hubpages, articles on wordpress.org, blogger.com, Goarticles, Ezine articles and others like this. If pages with little weight and importance such as these can get onto the page 1, or at very least page 2 and 3 then there is a good chance that a keyword rich domain optimized properly with unique content can also rank well. Make sure you see a decent amount of these type of pages from (at the very least) page 2 and 3 of results.

There are tools that can implement this method, or very similar methods for you on massive amounts of keywords, like Market Samurai or the more “blackhat” software program called SeNuke. I will review these at a later date, but for the purpose of this article I am showing you the way to do this for free.

Method 2. This method is not to different to the above method and can be used alongside it, however it provides are more in depth look at the competition and how many have optimized their sites properly. Using a combination of search engine syntax allintitle and allinurl. By typing allintitle:keyword you will be shown only the sites which are using the keyword in their metatitle tags on pages. By combining this with allinurl:keyword you can find out how many of these sites are being built by people who know what they are targeting. Ideally you want to see a large reduction in the amount of sites competing for a term as opposed to using the quotes method above.

As you can see in our examples the reduction was huge, from 38,000 sites generally competing to less than 2,000 using allintitle. Using allinurl also has less than 3000 sites for competition using the search term within their site or page URLs. This now tells you that if you are any good at SEO and know how to build a keyword rich site then there is a good chance built correctly with a handfull of strong backlinks you can rank for the term. It is also useful (again) to look through the first 4 or 5 pages of results, see if there are pages from sites with little weight like free blogging platforms and social network sites.

Please be aware that using the above syntax repeatedly in Google may lead to your IP being blocked for a couple of hours. As long as you don’t persist with the requests you will be fine. If you are going to do this type of search several times a minute on Google then it may be best to get a bunch of cheap proxies to use in Firefox from Proxy Bonanza. They also supply you with a firefox add on so you can easily switch between proxies and your own IP.

Method 3. If you have selected a product, service or website to promote then by using Googles keyword tool you can find out which keywords are currently being used to find that service or product. If you are not looking to promote a product, and are simply thinking of building an information site you can look at a website that is currently ranking high for your desired keyword to see what other terms are bringing the traffic to them. Using this method is useful because once you have a list of suggestions you can also find further keywords that may not have been expoited yet.

Make sure you set your locality in advanced search (or even language) to the target country you plan to promote your website. Also make sure you have added the column CPC in the results tables below. By selecting the “exact” checkbox down in the left hand menu you will find a list of keywords which are typed to find a certain website. This can show what other sites are targeting to get customers for the same products or keywords as you. Then you’re able to narrow down the keywords from this list into ones worth pursuing by checking the competition using methods 1 and 2.

If you do not find any keywords with potential, then try placing the actual keyword into the search tool rather than the website address and find related keywords which are similar for further research.

Hopefully some of the above is helpful, you may already know some of these tricks or maybe not. There is software available to speed up most of the above processes whic we will tackle in future articles. We will also go a bit deeper into niche market ideas by the way of researching competitor back links and such like. Stay tuned and comments welcome.