Time to Push the “Easy” Button on Niche Marketing

While others are chasing their asses by throwing all their investments into time sinks like Twitter and Facebook, you could be making money online the old school way.  It is called niche marketing and I will show you how to do it the right way….

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Most newbie marketers have their own idea of how to find and spot a niche and in most cases, they don’t do nearly enough to discover a niche worth going after. In the case of building an authority website, you would or should spend a good amount of time researching and getting to know your niche.  In most cases, this would include hours of keyword and competitive research.

News Alert: No amount of keyword software is going to help IF you don’t know what to REALLY look for…

I can say this because I have no vested interests in trying to sell you the latest and greatest keyword tool.  A lot of internet marketers think the trick is to find software to help them automate the keyword discovery process.  And while they may be helpful, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t used a keyword discovery tool in years.  Here is how I go about discovering money making niches.

Step 1- Find a niche that either represents desperate buyers OR has buyers who are rabid fans OR has products that can’t be easily bought offline.

Most newbie marketers understand the desperate buyers theory.  If someone has a toothache and googles a way to relieve their pain, then they are more likely to buy something immediately.  The same goes for someone that is unemployed and needs money.  The same goes for people who are having computer problem.  This is nothing new and something that most marketers, even the new ones, understand.

But what about the other two?

A blackhat buddy of mine who was stuffing forum sites once casually mentioned to me that the easiest sales he ever got was by targeting forums with weird fetishes.  When I state fetish, I am not talking about the triple x kind.  Instead, I am talking about the purse forums, the post-it note forums (yeah, there is a forum for people who love post-it notes, believe it or not), or from sock forums.

Niches with hard core fans buy things up en masse….

Not too long ago, I was doing a quick re-read on one of Seth Godin’s marketing books and in it, he described a couple guys who wrote a highly researched book on the Beatles.  Basically, what these guys did was find all the engineers, producers, ect. (pretty much anyone who dealt with them) and did in depth interviews with them.  They compiled the interviews in a book and then marketed it to music zealots that loved the Beatles.  The price of the book?  $100 and it was limited since they were doing all the publishing themselves.  The result?  They sold 300 books in a period of a month simply by targeting the forums that had the hard core fans. You could apply this technique to virtually any niche with rapid fans…..

The final note that an internet marketer should consider is whether the buyer can drive down the street to costco or walgreen’s and buy the product.  While this doesn’t necessarily equate to ultimate importance, understand that your chances of “hitting it” will increase ten fold if the product isn’t available offline.

Think magnetic therapy.  Think custom amplifiers.  Think…well, you get the picture….

A perfect example of this would be natural dog food recipes.  Think about it for a second….

• There is a rabid fan base to market to- Pet owners come in two groups.  The first group will treat a dog like a dog.  The second group will treat a dog like a person and do things that many would consider crazy.
• It is likely the average person wouldn’t be able to go out and purchase information easily offline- There are cities that may have information available in bookstores but it is likely that someone looking for natural dog food recipes in middle america would be hard pressed to find information offline.

Another example of this would be Lionel Train Sets

• Rapid fan base
• While they are available in specialty stores offline, these items are known to be purchased from eBay regularly from their hard core fan base…..

Believe it or not, nearly all niches have something like this.  It is just a matter of finding them.

Step 2: Start building a keyword list

Internet marketers don’t spend near enough the time they should preparing to find markets.  They don’t.  They are so consumed with the idea of making money that they think they can go full steam without much of a plan.  Worse still, they rely exclusively on keyword tools like Keyword Elite to do the data mining for them.  Big Mistake.

Google will give an internet marketer EVERYTHING that they need to plan an effective internet marketing campaign….

For the sake of simplicity, I am going to just go over one keyword potential.  In actuality, if I was targeting this market, I would do the same keyword research for each and every keyword.  In other words, this one keyword took me roughly 30 minutes to deduce.  However, I could likely spend a month mining keywords and determining market viability before I made my first website.  The only time this changes for me is if something is trending strongly….

Let’s suppose that we are looking at the potential of peddling a natural dog food product.  Let’s suppose that the slate is clean and we are simply looking for an “in”.

First part of keyword research is keyword discovery.  Our first part would be to find how “natural dog food recipes” has faired in Google….For this we will use google insights.

Google insights will give us a wealth of data that we can use.  For instance, we can see how the search volume has faired for our keyword (which isn’t real important in the grand scheme of things but can be useful) but it can also give us a look into the what and where for our marketing research….

The image below shows how our target keyword has faired over a few years. If it has a ton of interest, we can actually drill down in the countries to see what cities and states are most likely searching for our keyword.

In this image, I have clicked on “homemade dog food” and then drilled down to states that have been searching for this…

If you don’t realize the gravity of this data, then perhaps you are in the wrong profession.  What you are getting is a much more targeted version of the adwords external tool…

You are getting data that is refined over time so you can view the “trends”. While this particular keyword shows very little movement across the board, understand that there are some more seasonal or breaking out trends that can be discovered using this tool.

Plus, let’s suppose for a second that the majority of the searches are coming from a certain section of a country…can we say localized search??  Just a thought though…I will let you run with that idea…

Finally, there is additional information that will help you find the “breakout” keywords(see the image to the right)…..

Step 3 Determine Market Viability

It isn’t enough to go after the broad keywords.  They are usually way too competitive AND don’t convert as high as the long tail traffic would.  The key is figuring out what keywords will convert the highest.  We can start this process by taking a look at a couple things….First stop, what is google telling us?

First, no surpise here.  There are pages of adword ads and I mean PAGES.  I went all the up to the 30th page and there were still ads on the side.  This tells me that advertisers are targeting this.  Does it mean that it is profitable?  Maybe, maybe not.  But the important thing to remember is that if advertisers are spending money, then chances are great someone is making money.

Click the image to the left for a full view….

What does Google Adwords say?

While the numbers aren’t that great (I usually won’t touch a niche unless the competition is spending at least a dollar per click), it is still close enough where I may entertain it.

So up to this point, here is what we have determined….

• We have determined that homemade dog food is nice and stable as far as the keyword search query is concerned.  We have also determined that the market is US and Canadian.
• Out of the US market, we have determined that the Pacific Northwest has the most search queries, particularly Portland, Oregon (potential localized search).
• We have also found a plethora of keywords using Google Insights that google deems as “hot”.
• We have also determined that Video may be a quick in to the front page because google is utilizing universal search for the keyword.
• We have determined that the market is heavy laden (30+ pages!) with advertisers which means that there should be money in the keyword.
• We also have clues as to the “other” keywords that may be congruent with our search.

Step 4 Competitive Intelligence

Okay…so we know a little bit about our market.  Time to take it to the next level.  Let’s see how our competitors are fairing.  By the way, this will give us a little insight into whether this keyword is really worth going after and will also give us clues as to what keywords are proving to be the money makers in our niche…

For this, we will use Keyword Spy.  This is a membership site BUT you can get the data you need using the free function.  Sign up and then follow along with me….

Once you sign up, we are going to want to do a search query for our keyword to see how other advertisers are fairing.  From there we will go to the time machine which will give us data on how well our competitor’s ad campaigns have been doing.

By the way, this could also give us an insight into what we could promote, affiliate wise.  As you can see in the above image, the two glaring opportunities that are standing out has to do with eBay and Amazon, although there are way more opportunities than that.  Let’s dig a little more….

This time we are going to look at two different advertisers.  The first one is healthypetfooddirect, which appears to be a network marketing opp.  The second advertiser is selling an ebook on pet food dangers.  Notice the difference in ROI between the two.

Notice the difference in ROI?  One gets a decent ROI while the other one (the ebook) gets virtually nothing.

Why do I bring this up?  Because it is important to realize that different keywords will appeal to different buyers.  It is important to realize that some opportunities are going to fail because the research is flawed.

It is too easy to assume that an ebook will be of interest to a searcher just because it seems to be inline with the keyword.  In this case, an affiliate would be better off affiliating with an actual company that made a consumable product than a book that will help someone discover the dangers of pet food, right?  Then again, you could make your own product and test the waters as well.

In order to seriously profit from keywords, you need to understand what the searcher is really searching for.

Matching the right keyword to the right offer is paramount to making money online and is one of those things that most new internet marketers don’t get.

Once again, you will find more keywords to mine from as well as the ROI from the advertisers promoting with the keywords.  If you spend just a week using these methods, you will have a very clear indication of what what the searcher is searching for and be able to give them what they are looking for.

Plus, if you are looking into building an authority site, you will have mined all the good keywords that advertisers are bidding on AND have a very clear view of the landscape of your niche.

So, we have determined this so far:

• We know that our keyword gets traffic
• We know where the majority of traffic comes from geographically (in this case, the US and Canada).
• We know that there are other avenues of promotion that can be explored (universal search).
• We now have clues as to what the actual market is looking for thanks to competitive research.

Step 5 Determine how competitive your keyword is and come up with an internet marketing plan

When I say competitive, what I mean is we need to see what the top websites for that keyword are doing.

Are they entrenched?  How old are the domains?

How many links are linking to these sites?

What does Google say they are looking for (relevancy)?

Are there websites in the first 10 pages or blogs (or visa-versa)?

Are there any web 2.0 properties in the first 10 pages of the query?

What are the search results for the different search operators?

These are the questions that a marketer should be asking.

Let me be very clear here….an entrenched market does not mean you shouldn’t enter the market….it just means you need to look at the market more creatively….

What do I mean by being more creative with you internet marketing? Well, let’s suppose that you are trying to get into a competitive market that is saturated with advertisers and has some entrenched websites that aren’t budging.  What if rather than targeting the actual keyword, you started targeting (and leeching) traffic from the actual competitor’s site?  What if you targeted actual products in your niche?  There are plenty of ways to inch your way in a niche without having to directly compete…..

So let’s dive right into this then:

• Intitle search operator reveals that there are 1,200 competing pages.
• The #1 result is an article site that is actually hiring freelance writers.  The page itself has roughly 120 inlinks and the domain is a 12 year old domain.  The site is nothing more than an article database.
• On the first 3 pages of the search query, there are 8 web 2.0 platforms that are ranking for the keyword.  Most of these sites are NOT actively getting backlinks.  This could yield itself to a great marketing strategy for those who use web 2.0 properties.

Unlike other keywords, this keyword shouldn’t be very difficult to build a focused website.

If I were going to target this keyword, here is what I would do….

1. I would definitely utilize video and build links around that video to rank in the first page.
2. I would also create a straight arrow link profile among several web 2.0 properties, funneling link juice into my money site.  (it would look like this- ezinearticles>>>hubpages>>weebly>>squidoo, which would be my money site…)
3. I would also continue with keyword research on the niche itself and look into building an authority site (which I already have) while I was focusing on the long tail keywords.  Unlike Howie Schartz’s conversation domination, which is alll about quick hits, I know that creating your own site over the long haul is still the best way to go.

That is pretty much in a nutshell.  Keyword research is not rocket science.  However, most marketers simply don’t spend near enough time on it.  Most internet marketers will go to wordtracker, do a quick assessment of the numbers and then dive head on into a marketing campaign without having all the data to help ensure success.

And it really is all about minimizing risk with internet marketing, right?   The more information you have on a niche, the better chance you have of ranking and making money off of it.

Have fun with it, y’all.

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