Completing your niche research!

Posted on October 13, 2008
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing - basics |

So you should by now have a list of 2 or 3 possible markets that your interested in.  But how do you work out which ones are going to really work for you.  Well it’s time to do some more research and some more thinking.

1 Assess the things that you can control

What’s your budget?  How strong is your product experience, how strong are you design skills, how well do you understand the customer?

For each of the niches rate your skills.

2 What are your weaknesses?

So you’ve rated your skills and experience, but what things are going to hold you back?  You haven’t worked with the merchants before, if it’s a product site - can you get your hands on the product to review first hand?

List all your weaknesses and give them a score.

3 What outside factors are going to affect what you do?

This can be split into two parts - some factors are going to be positive e.g. it’s a growing market, new products are being released all the time, there are lots of merchants to promote; and some factors are going to be negative e.g. the commission being paid is low, you might not be able to PPC on some brands because of merchant restrictions, are the products always going to be in stock - if a product like the Wii for example is really popular it will be out of stock everywhere and you won’t earn any commission!

4 Compare your scores

So do the maths!  How do the scores match - compare the scores for the positive factors - your skills and the external opportunities,  with the things that are going to hold you back and the external negative factors and weigh them up.  How do they compare?  If the benefits outweigh the pitfalls in all three then you’re very lucky.  If however in all three it’s the reverse situation it doesn’t mean your ideas are completely dead in the water - it just means you’re probably going to have to work a  bit harder!

5 Review your competition in paid/sponsored advertising

When you search for something on Google the list of sites down the right hand side have all paid to be there.  These people will be your competitors - and the chances are if you’re not on page 1 in the paid ads then in the minds of the customer you don’t exist.

So what competitors are there?  How many are there?

6 Use Google Keywords tool

How to use this tool is a whole post, no book, in itself!  But it’s such a useful tool you really do need to learn how to get the best out of it properly.

You can use it to develop a list of keywords, find some that are going to be cheaper to promote in paid advertising, find some longtail keywords, assess the traffic volume/trends for some of your products.

Google isn’t the only place you can try though - try Wordtrackers free tool as well to offer up different results.

7 Use Google itself

Once you have a list of your keywords start to put some of them into Google and search.  So to use a previous example of ladies golf shoes examine what happens.  Ladies Golf shoes brings up (at the time of writing) 153 paid ads!  But if you include a brand name ladies footjoy gold shoes that reduces to 27, and if you include a specific pair Ladies Footjoys eComfort (my preference if anyone wants to send me a pair of size 7s - in pink of course) - then it reduces to only 5 sponsored ads.

But don’t just look at the paid ads - look at natural search.  You’re unlikely to get any visitors to your site if you are past page 3 or 4.  But you should really be aiming to get on the first page.  Have a look for some specific keywords using the Allintitle tag.  This will indicate how many pages are really optimized for that item rather than just mentioning it somewhere on the page.  A general search for ladies golf shoes in google brings up 87,000 odd pages but use allintitle:”Ladies Golf Shoes” and it brings up just 617 pages.  so substiture your keyword in allintitle:”yourkeyword” and away you go - reveal your true competition.

So do your research and it will help you come up with some proper market data, some good keywords to exploit and a good idea of where and who your real competitors are.  They might not be who you thought they were in the beginning.

So if you follow the seven steps in my previous post, and the seven steps from today you should be off to a really good start - you haven’t made a blind leap of faith - but should be reasonably secure in your decisions.

For the record I did the same steps and this is what I came up with:

  1. Cameras and other consumer electronics (my husband is a professional photographer remember and likes other gadgets etc)
  2. Children ( I have two who take up an enormous amount of time - but it’s all good)
  3. Cooking
  4. Shoes (most ladies do thought right?)

Not a great list though I have to admit.  But I am going to try and develop one of these areas and will post about it later when I’ve made more progress on it!

But I also had to search for some other inspiration though and will post about where you can look another time.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy these!
  • Do you want to start out in Affiliate Marketing?
  • Domain name hunting we will go.
  • How do I get on Page 1?
  • Google adwords - I’m about to dip my toes in the water.
  • The Power of the Link

    • or read my previous post: Have you made a list of possible niches?

    or read the next one: Help getting over Niche Researcher’s block

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