How Finding the Right Niche Market Can Turn Ordinary Profits Into Extraordinary Profits, Part 3 of 5 - Internet Marketing Australia

Market Research - The Tools For A Profitable Niche Business

Welcome back to Part Three of this five part series. I hope you've found some great ideas performing the research we did in Part Two, because today we are going to delve straight down into building the foundation for your online home based niche business. We are going to introduce you to some heavy duty MARKET RESEARCH tools to help you build the foundation for your online home based business. Let me stress this point, Market Research is an absolutely necessary part of building a successful online home based business. The reason this is the case is because market research will help you determine the level of competition in the niche you are interested in, the level of demand and it will reveal the supply for that niche. Do you think this is something you can use to help build your online home based business? I'm sure you do, so please read on.

Last week or two, we came up with a bunch of ideas, now we are going to take those ideas and test how they will fit into a niche market. Based on my example with the 9 ideas, I am going to introduce you to some tools you can utilize to help you target specific keywords or keyphrases within each category. As a word of caution, this process will take some time, simply because we will be digging deep in to pull out that special niche that will be our golden egg, some ideas will not work for us, so we need to be willing to throw away those ideas and move on.

There are four FREE tools that I recommend using and one paid tool, they are:

1. Google keywords tool
2. Google.com
3. Alexa Toolbar
4. Spreadsheet program

Google Keywords Tool

The first tool is the "Google keyword tool." The link to this tool is https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool gives you a general overview of the market and shows several columns including: advertiser competition (supply), monthly search volume(demand) and average search volume (avg. monthly demand over 12 mo. Period). Due to recent developments, the Google keyword tool has become a more effective tool. Go ahead and type in one of the ideas that you came up with last week. For my example, I used volleyball. Once you get the results review the above columns and see how everything is laid out.

As you perform your keyword research, you will notice that advertiser competition displays a green horizontal bar, this bar represents the amount of competition for that keyword. If the whole horizontal bar is green, that means very high competition, less green means less competition, which is good. If you look at the search volume, it shows numbers, this used to be a horizontal bar just like the advertiser competition column, so you only get a very general view. With specific numbers now, you can get a more specific view of the demand and supply on the keywords displayed. The trick to this is to find high demand and low competition for your keywords and this basically means many people are looking, but not enough people are selling or supplying enough to meet the need. For my volleyball keyword, I found 2 breakouts that have decent average demand and no competition, the keywords were "volleyball mizuno" and "volleyball sports." Make note of the average monthly search volume for your keywords because we will need these numbers. Continue to do this search for all the keyword ideas you came up with in the previous brainstorming session.

Google.com

The second tool you will need to use is one that everyone should be very familiar with, the Google.com search engine. With the keywords that you generated in the keyword search tool, take these keywords and type them into the Google search engine, but enclose these keywords with quotes. So for my example, I got volleyball mizuno, I would type "volleyball mizuno" into Google.com. By enclosing the search term in quotes, you will get very specific results, go ahead and test it with and without quotes and notice the difference. The results of the search should show about a quarter of the way down the search engine and is in a blue horizontal bar across the screen on the far right side. It should say "Results 1-10 of X amount." Make note of total search results, this is the section after "Results 1-10 of." This number is needed later to help you determine a niche.

Alexa Toolbar

The third tool I would like to mention is the Alexa toolbar. This tool is very useful when you go to a website, such as a competitors and you wanted to see how much traffic they receive. The Alexa toolbar will show this information. This tool should be used in conjunction with the second tool. Go to Alexa's website and download this tool, it will go through an installation process and install the toolbar in your web browser. One word of caution on this tool, because spyware removal programs will detect it as spyware, you need to configure the spyware removal program to ignore Alexa to allow smooth operation.

Spreadsheet Program

Fourth, you will need a spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Excel and if you don't want to pay for the spreadsheet program, download Open Office from htttp://www.openoffice.org for FREE, a complete Office productivity suite that has everything that Microsoft Office offers, such as word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, database and graphics. Wait a minute, did you say FREE? This too good to be true. You better believe it, this is the poor man's Microsoft Office suite, for all of us who don't want to pay for Microsoft Office. Anyways, back to our spreadsheet program, you need this so that you can combine the data that you find from the above tools and make an informed decision on what niche market you will ultimately decide on. Of course, this is your first niche market, once you build a profitable online home based business with this, you will ultimately continue the same process for all future businesses, but that is another story.

I hope that you have found the above information useful. As a closing thought, go ahead and try out the tools that I have discussed above, get a feel for them, type in your keywords and see what comes up. If you don't have Microsoft Office, go ahead and download Open Office and try that out, see how you like it and learn how to use it. In my next article, I will show you how to put all the data that you get from using these tools and creating a spreadsheet that will help you make a very informed decision on which keywords will ultimately become your niche market. Until next time, I want to wish all of you the best of success in your search for the perfect online home based business.