The Internet Marketing Challenge Blog

Niche Research

So, to get the ball rolling these are the criteria I have used to find a good niche for this challenge..

1. There are at least 10 advertisers on adwords for the main keywords associated with my niche.
2. The top 10 of Google for the main keywords in the niche are not all made up of big players like amazon, microsoft, wikipedia etc.. (I don’t mind a couple of them just not all of them)
3. There is a search volume for these keywords of above 15,000 per month on exact match.
4. There is an abundance of active forums, newsgroups, social media sites, videos etc associated with the niche.
5. It is an interesting subject that can potentially be newsworthy.
6. It has to be something I am interested in, even if just a little bit or something that I can get interested in.

With this criteria in place, where do I start the whole process?

1. Brainstorm as many subjects as possible that I am interested in, or maybe just remotely interested in and list them down.
2. Keyword research to nail down the high search volume niches.
3. If the niche is quite broad I will dig down to check out the subniches.
4. Shortlist the best niches.
5. Research forums and other social sites to see how active people are in these niches.
6. Looking for plenty of posts and a lot of new ones.
7. Check out the competition in Google’s top 10 for each of the niches to see if I can take them on.
8. Check out the level of adwords advertisers in each niche and how much the average bid is for the main keywords.
9. Make a decision on one.

An Example…
For the sake of this example I will pretend that I am interested in sleep (not literally) and after a bit of digging I decided to research “sleep apnea” as a niche to see if its a good one.

First of all “sleep” gets an exact search volume of 368,000 per month and “sleep apnea” gets a very healthy 135,000 searches per month so it passes that test.

The next step is to see if there are any active forums etc in that niche. I googled the following term “sleep apnea” + forum and immediately I find apneasupport.org/forum-1.html which is extremely active. Hmmm.. looks good so far. While looking I will do a quick snapshot to see if there are some recurring problems or topics on the forum but that is as far as it goes so far. I can see with sleep apnea that there is, so that is another tick.

I will repeat the search to find videos, web 2.0 sites, newsgroups etc. and then log the URL’s onto a spreadsheet.

I will then go to google or better still fire up market samurai to look at the top 10 on Google for the phrase “sleep apnea”.. Oh dear, the competition is big, in fact to big for me to take on easily. Time to dig down deeper or also cast my net wider into sleep. After a bit more research I find “sleep aids” which passes all the previous tests but also has a top 10 in Google that I reckon I can take on. There are some big players in there but also some that can be beaten I am sure.

After a quick check on CPC and number of advertisers then “sleep aids” pretty much ticks all the boxes!

** This is purely an example of the approach I am taking, I have not decided on “sleep aids” as a niche **