Niche Research Manifesto – Part 5

Niche Research Manifesto – Part 1
Niche Research Manifesto – Part 2
Niche Research Manifesto – Part 3
Niche Research Manifesto – Part 4

Final Thoughts on Niche Research Success:

As you can see, there are quite a few things you can do to ensure your niche website’s success. The more research you do, the better able you are going to be to avoid problems and make money by concentrating on what works.

You will want to watch the site once it starts getting traffic – this will give you a lot of information – but in the beginning the more research you do the better off you’re going to be. This is the step that many people try to skip – and it shows!

Look, there are many ways to go about making money online. You have picked a niche website – and a niche – which is great. You now need to do the proper research, before you dive in so that you can set up your categories and site navigation the smartest way possible.

You may think that all of this is overwhelming – but, if you create the proper spreadsheets and take your time to go down the list, using one idea after the other, you will find it’s not that difficult.

When you are finished and are able to put together a killer niche website, you are going to see that it was definitely worth the time.

There are many other things you are going to need to succeed, but this is a great foundation to have. Proper research for your niche is vital if you want success in later stages of the process. The tips and techniques outlined above are great ways to make sure you’re a step ahead of your competition.

Others that are succeeding have probably used some of these tips themselves, but by looking at a lot of different examples and compiling the data in your handy dandy spreadsheets, you’re going to be able to cherry pick the best of the best ideas – whatever your niche.

While laser-targeted small niches may not have as much competition, any research you do is going to be beneficial in the long haul. When you’re building a niche website to make money, you need to pay attention to all the small details so that you can stand out from the crowd and be successful.

With so many people building niche websites these days, you really need to make sure that you do all the proper research and keep great notes. The payoff for all the “work” is going to be worth it…

Final thought: Find what your prospects want and offer them valuable solutions to their problems. Find how your competitors try to do it and borrow their best ideas. Execute.

Hope you enjoyed this series. If you have any questions, feel free to email me or post below :-)

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Niche Research Manifesto – Part 4

Niche Research Manifesto – Part 1
Niche Research Manifesto – Part 2
Niche Research Manifesto – Part 3

Other Sources of Niche Ideas

While dedicated tools and even the Google search engine itself are powerful ways to generate ideas for your niche, there are other resources you can leverage:

Yahoo Answers

This is usually a great way to see what questions people are asking. This can give you an idea of what some of your prospects want in your niche.

This information can be used to craft sales messages to be able to sell them products and make a profit. This is what a money-making niche website is all about.

Amazon.com

Amazon has been around for a long time – for a good reason – they know a lot about sorting products by price and quality. With the addition of customer reviews, they usually give a good look at products in any niche.

Look at the table of contents for various info-products in your niche. This will give you ideas on what are some of the sub-themes you can target.

Look at the customer reviews. Focus especially on the negative ones (1-2 stars). Those usually reveal unmet needs and opportunities for you to come in.

Read Merchant Sales Letters

By looking at how your competitors sell to prospects, you are going to know what’s working. As with other sources, keep a spreadsheet of the data so similarities can be noted. You want the best of the best techniques.

Pay careful attention to the Clickbank marketplace, because many sales letters have all the right elements. Also, check out offers from Offervault or other independent merchants.

Look for hooks, headlines, bullets, testimonials, and what emotional buttons they push. All of this data should be logged in your spreadsheet. Once you’re done collecting information, you should have a definitive top 10 list of things to try in your own sales messages

Read the “Affiliate Program” Pages for Merchants:

You should seek out merchants in your niche and look at pages or websites they have put together for their affiliates. These are usually full of promotional tools that you can use, keywords to think about, as well as giving general information about your niche.

Remember that this data is available to everyone else too, so don’t just go with what one merchant says. Compile the data from multiple sources – and then pick the best of the best ideas.

Browse Forums:

When you are browsing forums in your niche, take notice of what forum categories are used. Also, take a look at popular threads and recurring questions. This gives you a good idea of how to structure information and what people are looking for in your niche.

TIP: When you’re done with the initial research phase for your niche, cut down the amount of time you spend on the forums. You still want to stop by to keep up, but there is a thing as spending too much time on a forum. Remember to apply what you have learned.

Find and Read Blogs:

In addition to popular forums in your niche, check out the blogs. In particular, look at the most popular posts as well as the comments on the blogs.

Most of the time, this will be a very valuable source for information about your niche. People really open up and share their thoughts and challenges they are facing.

Visit ezinearticles.com

This article directory is another way to get ideas. Search for keywords in your niche. Take a look at what the articles say.

What headlines are used? What products are being promoted? All of this information can lead you to what is important in your niche.

TIP: Use RSS to keep up on leading writers in your niche. This can be a good way to see emerging trends when they occur.

Find Unbiased Customer Reviews of Products:

Search the Internet for questions like “does xyz work.” This will lead to quite a bit of information from consumers – the “truth tellers”, when it comes to product reviews. Well, most of the time.

As with the other ideas, you want to collect a lot of data from many websites and compare similarities to see what the most important aspects for your niche are going to be.

You can also search for product names on popular niche forums. This will tell you how consumers feel about a product. If the product is of low quality, you can avoid it. If the product has weaknesses, you can create a bonus that “fixes” the problem. This is a great way to add value to your affiliate promotions.

Search MARKETING Forums:

Take a look at marketing forums to see what (if anything) other marketers are saying about this niche.

By looking around and researching on what others have done, you can find out what has worked in the niche and what doesn’t. This is all great information that can help you succeed with your niche website.

Some marketers make the mistake of thinking “Oh, I don’t want to have anything to do with ‘internet marketing.’ I just want to go niche.”

Guess what, pal: You aren’t marketing in a vacuum. Every niche has prospects and marketers who sell to those prospects. Google, Youtube, Yahoo, MSN etc all have marketing departments.

That “niche” information product you want to promote is created by a marketer who knows a lot about information publishing, affiliate marketing, etc.

This ain’t charity. Instead of demonizing marketers, see how to leverage the work they have done.

PLR (private label rights) articles or auto-responder messages may be available. Or, ready-made landing pages. If so, these can make your life easier and help kick-start your advertising campaign…

Stay tuned for part 5 (the last one) :-)

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Niche Research Manifesto – Part 3

Niche Research Manifesto – Part 1

In Part 2 of the Niche Research Manifesto, we talked about different tools that can help you research your niche. Let’s see how to use another free, powerful and underutilized tool: Google Search.

Finding Niche Gold with Google:

Beyond websites that have been set-up to research niche topics, there are many advanced searches you can use with Google to “dig up” information about your niche – whatever it might be. Here are some ideas that you may or may not have thought about before.

TIP: As with the other methods, make sure you keep that spreadsheet handy and compile the data so that you can study it when you’re done finding all the information you need.

Study Google Adwords Landers

By looking at the “landing pages” or “landers” for Google Adwords ads, you can quickly get the best ideas from your competitors while at the same time avoiding their mistakes. Look closely at the particular products they promote for your niche.

This can tell you what is working and what products you should concentrate on for your own niche website efforts. You don’t want to simply copy the landing pages – but you can definitely gat inspiration from them.

Look at ten to twenty (at least) landing pages and compile a list of “best ideas” from each of them. At the end, tally the results and take the best of the best ideas and make them your own. Again, a spreadsheet will help you keep track of all this information.

TIP: After you look at so many landers, you are going to be able to quickly glance at them and know what’s what. When you look at hundreds of them, you will be really good at finding the little details that really make a landing page work – converting and profitable.

Search Top Google Results:

Search for your keywords when you are logged out of Google (so you don’t get results tailored to you, based on your search history).

Closely examine at least the top five to ten websites that are ranking for that keyword. Again, remember that spreadsheets and compiling this data for later analysis is important, if you want to make the most from the information.

Google Images Search of Popular Banner Ad Sizes:

You can use Google Images to find banners that have “advertising dimensions.” I especially like looking for those that are 250X250 and 300X250. These are some of banners with the highest click-through rates.

Here’s an example of 250X250 banners related to the keyword “lose weight.”

This can give you great ideas for angles to use in the marketing tactics you employ to get results.
Search Google for: Newsletter + Keyword

Typing the word “newsletter” plus your keyword or phrase into Google will allow you to see the “lead magnets” in your niche. Take careful notice of what the “squeeze pages” say about the niche.

Look closely at what is sent to you in each and every email. Start up a spreadsheet and start noting the similarities between all the emails.

After you do this for a while, you will have compiled a list of even more “undercover” products that your competitors promote. You will also get ideas to use in your email marketing.

TIP: To get even more information, sign-up for an email account somewhere (like Google or Yahoo.) After you have this “throw-away” email address, simply sign-up for as many email lists as possible in your niche.

Search Google for Queries like…

Here are some sample queries you can type into the Google search box to find what you need:

intitle:”main keyword” intitle: “demographics”
intitle:”main keyword” intitle: “main problems”

This may allow you to tap into research others have already done. There is no need to spend all the time researching, if others have done it for you already. And no matter what mid-level or big niche you are in, someone has likely done the research by this point.

The trick is in knowing how to create Google queries that return only the data you want. As you play with Google Operators and construct complex searches, you will become better at it, which will enable you to tap into a lot more research. As you might imagine, this is going to radically increase your chances of success.

TIP: Don’t be afraid to spend the time to learn about Google Search operators. The more you know, the better crafted queries you are going to be able to create…

In Part 4, we’ll talk about other places to get valuable niche research data from. Stay tuned :-)

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Niche Research Manifesto – Part 2

In Part 1 of the Niche Research Manifesto, we talked about the need to stay organized by creating a spreadsheet.

Now, let’s get to the good stuff :-)

Popular Niche Tools:

Next, we are going to look at some of the popular ways to research your niche.

You may have heard of some of these – but there’s a good chance you’ll get some ideas you hadn’t considered…

From official Google tools to other websites that offer research possibilities, these are some of the best ways to learn more about your niche, once you have decided what it is going to be.

TIP: Don’t concentrate on just one or two tools. Use free ones and, when you can afford them, go with professional paid tools – whether software or web-based. Remember, the more information you have that your competitors don’t have, the better off you’re going to be on the “playing field” – aka “da intrawebz.”

The Google Keyword Tool

Use [exact match] and sort by volume of searches. What you are looking for is the intent behind the top searches. What similar searches appear around your chosen keyword? This is a tool that everyone else uses, but it is a powerful way to know (direct from the source) what keywords are popular.

By using exact match and looking at similar keywords and phrases, you are going to be able to deduce the intent behind the searches. This is very important to know if you want to monetize your niche website.
Google Wonder Wheel

This is another great source of data from Google that will allow you to find related phrases no matter what your niche is. While it is a tool that is available in the search options panel in Google, there are also various sources and scripts you can use to get the data more easily.

TIP: Knowing similar and related phrases is a great way to dig deeper (and deeper) into your niche. The Wonder Wheel is not the only tool to do this manually. There are other ways to get the information you are after for your niche. As you work with Google Wonder Wheel more and more, you will become better at using it.

Here are some Google Wonder wheel tutorials:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ah7ZWYjxdM
http://dxjones.com/wonder/wheel.php
http://getonthenet.org/wheel/wheel/wheel.php

Labnol Google Adsense Sandbox

On this website, you can enter your keyword and see the ads that are running on the Google Display Network (the “Content Network”). See what hooks are used and what products are being promoted. This is very useful information for creating your niche website. The more you know about your competition, the better off you’re going to be.

TIP: Study all the competitors that you can. The more information you have on what others are doing, the more you are going to be able to stay ahead of your competition, which is the way to outfox them…

Keyword Spy

While there is a paid version of this service, you can sign up for a free account. Once you do that, you can enter keywords and get even more ideas for your niche.

You can see at a glance what keywords your competitors use: Both in the Organic search results and the Adwords advertisers.

Google insights:

At the Google Insights website, simply enter some of your keywords – one per field. Select either the last 12 months or last 30 days for the time period. This will allow you to see rising searches at the bottom right.

This is a terrific way to research your niche and even make predictions on what directions the niche is headed, so that you can prepare content for the future. These “insights” are extremely valuable, when used correctly.

TIP: Google Insights is great for finding seasonal trends and predict seasonal spikes in traffic. Also, you can use it to compare brands and companies to decide who you should work with and concentrate on…

In Part 3, we will talk about how t use Google in order to find even more information on our niche. Stay tuned…

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Niche Research Manifesto – 20 ways to research your niche, understand your prospects better and own your competitors – Part 1

Introduction:

You probably know this by now, but niche websites are a great way to create multiple revenue streams online. If you want to earn a living online, you need to stand out from all the others who are also trying to make money online.

If you can do this, you have a very good chance of making some serious money. No matter what niche you have decided to build a website around, if you can build a website that is better than the others in your niche, you are going to be successful.

While some people spend a lot of time on finding a particular niche to go into, few spend adequate time researching the niche after that point. This is a very crucial stage of the process, however.

It’s like saying you want to bake a cake, but then decide you aren’t concerned about finding the right ingredients to put in.Can you imagine the type of cake you would end up with!? Probably not very tasty. :-)

Building a niche website without researching the “ingredients” will leave you with a mess that will cost more money than it makes. This is NOT what you want.

Researching a niche isn’t rocket science by any means, but armed with this information, you’ll be able to quickly find out what type of content you need for your website to attract visitors – and eventually customers.

We will start with ways you can stay organized. Then, we will go into some of the more popular research tools that you can use to speed up the process. The next section deals with ways to use Google to find juicy niche information.

While all the above information is great and will be enough to keep you busy for hours and hours, I also have some other sources of information on whatever niche you are getting into – which are very valuable.

Finally, I have some parting words of wisdom about doing niche research. While this guide is not the final word on researching a niche, it’s a great “recipe” that will help make sure your “cake” isn’t a flop.

If you’re ready to go, prepare to get excited. Some of these ideas that you didn’t think about can make the difference between you being successful and a failure when it comes to making money online.
Staying Organized

If you haven’t noticed this by now, it is VERY easy to get distracted on the Internet. You can start searching for the best questions related to golf clubs and end up with 20 tabs open for who knows what…

To help avoid this – so that you can find information and content that will keep visitors on your website – you need to stay organized. This cannot be stressed enough. While you may be able to “get by” without paying attention to the details, if you want to excel, you need to take good notes.

Here are some basic tips to help keep your niche research organized:

Use a Spreadsheet to keep you organized:

If you are whining that you can’t afford Microsoft Excel, stop. :-)

Go get a copy of OpenOffice.org, which is free and has spreadsheet software included (named “Calc”). If you are not familiar with spreadsheets, spend some time learning the basics – adding new “sheets,” setting up columns, etc.

Create the following columns:

Website URL Column: Use this to keep track of all the websites that you find in your niche. From competitors to ones you can use to “borrow” ideas, this is a good list to have.

Good Ideas Column: As you visit these websites (I’ll show you how to find them later), simply jot down your ideas so that you won’t forget them.

Mistakes Column: In this column you will be noting down all the obvious mistakes your competitors make. That way, you can make sure you avoid them.

Sometimes we can see the errors in other people’s behavior, but not in ours. You need to become conscious of what mistakes to avoid. For example: “this site is woo wide and doesn’t look properly in all screen resolutions.”

Keywords Column: Get ideas for some “themes” your competitors use. For example, if you start with the keyword “jump higher”, you may come across a term like: “increase vertical.”

Products / Offers Column: Keep a running list of products and offers available for your niche. These are basically affiliate programs that you may be able to promote.

Don’t get “stuck” in one type of product either. Be open minded. Digital products and physical products. One-time sale and recurring memberships. Information and software. Text, audio and video. Just note down what you come across.

The more organized you are, the easier it is going to be to track progress. This is one of the key tips to being successful with your niche website efforts.
But what if I ain’t a spreadsheet type of dude (or dudette)?

Some people feel weird, when they are about to use a spreadsheet. They don’t want to feel like they are being “too organized” or “not intuitive.”

The fact of the matter is that our brains can’t hold all this info – unless you are some kind of genetic freak with a photographic memory. If you happen to be, I envy you :-)

The rest of us need a way to “store” our thoughts and ideas. Use spreadsheets, Notepad files, pen and paper or whatever else you want. But get organized and don’t keep all this info inside your head.

The Benefits of Being Organized:

We have briefly gone over some of the benefits of tracking data in your niche, but here are some more.

Accessibility – When you are better organized, information is easier to find and access. This makes it easier to actually use the information to your advantage. There is so much info available online that it can be overwhelming, if you don’t break it down into bite-sized chunks.

Ideas – If you ever run out of ideas, you will have a source of inspiration to draw from without doing more research. Let’s say that you regularly create content around your niche. You should never run out of subject ideas. If you have a list of ideas that is carefully organized, you can more easily access them and use them to your advantage.

Progress – By keeping track of changes, mistakes, and other information, you can better track your progress over time. This allows you to see what is working and what is not working.

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll get to the “meat.” For now, create the spreadsheet and look out for the next part…

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