Niche, Market, and Keyword Research

First things first.

What is Niche?

Niche is a group of people who are interested in a particular topic.
Yes, your niche is something you are going to promote.

Please Please do not do the same mistake i did, Find your niche first before the product. Most people find the product first, they then throw up a website or blog,add their affiliate links and expect sales to role in, that is not the point. That will damage your campaign for the long term.

Identify your niche

Where do we start? hm..
Ok firstly, start from digging in yourself, what i mean is your hobbies or things you interested in..
This one is easier to do and very useful when This is your first attempt in affiliate marketing. Focus on those areas.
Are you trying to lose weight? a passionate golfer? are you an expert in cooking? Do you like traveling? there are so much more to cover, i presume you can find it yourself.

When you are one of them, in your niche.. it would be whole lot easier.

secondly, there are literally hundreds of places to find niche MSN, Google, Ebay, Yahoo, Forum, Magazine, TV, Radio.. And when you are going out on a walk, Pay attention to the real world, the things that is around you..
It could be people around you or the building around you, which building? Bookstores, Cinema, Shopping mall, Clothes stores, Hey.. Those are just a tiny part of the real world.

I will just concentrate on one to give you an example..
Do you have a TV at home? I think you have one..

Take notice of the programmes on the TV and take a piece of paper, start jotting them down.

Health, Car, Sex, Gambling, Sports, and so on.
Then you would as well write down the subcategories for example:

In Health there are weight loss, fitness, smoking, etc etc.
In Sports there are football, soccer, basketball, etc etc.

See how easy it is, I only scratch the surface but i believe you can do better to put together people's interests. Those are very broad we will need to travel to the next step Market research

Ok!..Let's get going..

Now that you have been in this part, I will tell you that you can actually do your market research during the niche identification, but be careful of not being distracted because of the hot market.

You don't want to leave what you are interested behind because you see a particular niche is a hot market, which you do not even know a thing about that niche.
But one thing though, do not as well stick to the niche you like but there is no money in it.

Don't be confused, pick as many niches as possible.. Well if you can not find niches that you like then you have to prepare yourself to learn about it.

Identify a hungry niche
This one is of course very significant to your success. Hungry niche does not necessarily mean there is money in it.

You have to dig deeper, there are two kinds of them:
Does that hungry niche have money to spend or ready to put their credit card on the table while searching for products online?

second point is are they fanatic about their interests or desperate to get solutions? for instance a first time mother will ensure her baby gets the best care.

There are some places where you can dig deeper:

Yahoo!group, MSN group, Meetup.com,
Ebay.com ( you can browse and see what is hot currently, this is a big help)
Yahoo buzz, Amazon.com, Forums, etc etc...

Don't miss the real world activities.. From TV, magazine, or take notice of people around you..

You realise that most part of magazine or TV are the advertisements right?
If there are still advertisements, that might mean that the market is hot.

When you take a walk and overheard a group of girls talk about Louis Vuitton Purse, which is hot because They see Jennifer Anniston carried it in Celebritity TV show. You better prepare your paper and pen.

Do you notice those three words, Celebrity TV Show..
See.. do you watch TV? it might help.. if you don't, no worries you have internet to put into good use.

If you want to see if it is a really hot niche, check how many forums exist. Try Google or Yahoo search engine.. "Niche name + Forum".
If there aren't any, don't bother to work on the niche.
If there are then you might want to see how hot it is by exploring the forum, to see as well if there is money in the niche.

Yahoo Groups or MSN Groups might as well help for the testing.

To investigate the hotness of a niche could as well be done in article searching and google trends.

Go search articles for your niche at articles directory such as goarticles.com or ezinearticles.com, not only limited to those two, there are several more.
See if there are many articles about your niche.

Try Google trends, this one is very important as you will as well use it in keyword research. Type you niche and you will see how many searches performed by people.
You can also compare the popularity of the niche by seperating every niche with koma (,); see the example below as i compare two niche such as Car and Fashion.



I think it is quite obvious to see without me explaining that, isn't it?

You must try it yourself because you can see much explanations, I had cut some part in order to fit it to this lens.

Ow.. The hard part is coming..
Yes, It could be the hardest part of all when you have not got used to it.

There are so much tools available to help you find keyword, But there is one that is the most sophisticated keyword tool ever that money can't buy, The tool is in you.. Needless to say, it is your BRAIN..

Like said above, You are going to think like what your prospects think..Get into your prospects' mind..

Keyword is simply a pharse your prospects' (ok let say people) type in the search engine to find things they want
You might as well want to think in simplicity, imagine what will your prospects type when they are desperate trying to find answer to solve their problem

I've been getting advice so many times or even read about it, that I should go with long tail keyword, after thinking about the reasons, it starts making sense to me.
Using Long tail keyword means you can get more targeted traffic, which means serious people who are more likely wanting to purchase what they are searching.

It does not only limited to that reason but also for the sake of your PPC campaign.
You don't want to put a keyword money in your PPC campaign (let's not getting to specific in google adwords' term so i would just say PPC campaign).

Money is too broad, you will have to pay a lot of money to Google, because there is a chance your ad might appear whenever someone type "money" on the search engine. You don't want that, do you?
That is not targeted enough.

That is why, Long tail keyword is a MUST, which mean you have to be specific.

Let say you want to promote "make money online" product, well you can use that but you might want to be a little creative.
"how to make money online"
"how to make money from home"
"make money from home tips"

There are whole lot of possibilites, just be creative and think like what your prospects' think.
Well for this thing, you have to train. When you get use to it, you would find it easier.
Brainstorming is not bad though..

There are many tools for your keyword research, use overture keyword,which is free or the free version of wordtracker.

Remember to check google trends.

Wealthy Affiliate provides that tool as well, and much more tools.

Google Keyword tool


Free tool from Google, that enables you to find your keyword on the clickbank products you want to promote, even better you can spy on your competitor's keyword. Why not try it?

Keyword Elite


A special weapon for you although it is a bit complicated to use. once you understand it, this would be a very great tool.

30 Day Challenge


Joining this group will help you in many ways, so why not! It is free. You'll get a lot of idea on how to find your niche, research your market and keyword, drive traffic, etc.

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