50 Ways to Discover and Research a Niche Market
February 9, 2008
During this first week of the Build a Niche Store Empire in 12 Weeks series, we have been talking quite a bit about discovering and researching your niche market BEFORE you make the mistake of jumping in to a oversaturated or simply, non performing sector.
This post will serve as a place for all of us to list links to various internet resources and programs for Niche Market research.
View the List below!
The list is separated into a few different categories: Paid Tools, Free Tools, Desktop Applications and Other Web Resources.
(Note: All links open in a new window)
I know, it not yet quite 50 ways, but with YOUR HELP, we will have it at 50 in no time at all! :-) If you have a blog, forum, website, or any other resource that you feel should be included, please comment below and it will be added if it fits!
Paid Niche Research Tools
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Wordtracker Keyword Research - Probably the most popular and widely used research tool online right now. Wordtracker has a proven track record of providing metrics that have consistently delivered results to users. The free version is listed below as well.
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Wordze Keyword Tools - One of the newer players in the keyword research market, by new, I mean less than 2 years old! Some of things I have really grown to like about Wordze in a short amount of time are the wide array of reports they offer, the trending graphs that allow you to somewhat predict site performance based on search volume throughout a full year, and the Dig Tool that literally goes extremely deep into a term and delivers thousands of terms the competition is using in the specific market!
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Free Niche Research Tools
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Google Adwords Sandbox - A GREAT utility from Google that has its own pros and cons, but ultimately it IS Google Data, which they guard closely!
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Google Suggest Lab - Often overlooked, the Google suggest lab is great for quick and easy ideas! As you start typing into the search box, Google shows you some of the more popular phrases as well as the number of results in the index. Try it… type Golf into the search box and look at the results window.
Here is a video that shows the concept.
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Wordtracker Free Keyword Research Tool - Similar to the paid version above, but offers limited data to browse through. The results are MSN database only, but still very useful in the early stages of research!
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Niche Market Generator - This thing is just too cool for those of you having a hard time finding a Niche Market. Beware though, even though it shows 100 or so markets, they are likely targeted by someone else or they wouldn’t be in the database! :-)
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Ebay Pulse - Find a daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks, and cool stuff on eBay
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Google Trends Lab - Even though this tool is somewhat limited with its results, again, it IS Google Data! The way I use the tool is to type in several related terms in niche and then watch the volume trends. A good example would be in one of my favorite sports, NASCAR. Assume I want to create a niche site focused on a driver… In the search box, I type in who I think would be the most popular for the site. Dale Jr, Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Kasey Kayne and Tony Stewart.
The results show me the trend of popularity amongst the group in search volume, over a period of time.
Note: Your data will be useless if you don’t enter more than 1 search term.
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Clickz Stats Page - The Clickz stats page is a great place to just go and start bouncing in and out of various stats to do with the internet! This page is a good example of what you can dig and find in the various links from the page. Expect yourself to get lost for an hour or two when you go there… the statistics are amazing!
Desktop Applications for Niche Research
- WebCEO Webmaster Tools - WebCEO is more than just a research tool, it provides a webmaster ALL the tools for managing a website! From keyword research and suggestion tools to directory submitter and search engine ranking functions, it covers it all! There is a free and paid version of WebCEO…
Various Other Resources for Niche Discovery
- Market Research and Statistics from eMarketer - eMarketer has many free articles that discuss the hottest trends in business. Simply by enrolling for email updates, you can get a daily newsletter that provides ideas for niche websites. If you intend to be successful and stay in front of other niche marketers, you will need to spend a little time ever day (30 minutes) following sites like this.
- Mpire - Mpire is used for research like you’ve been using Terapeak. You can search for a particular niche item and see how many sales it’s gotten in the last month as well as average sale price. It’ll also tell you what percentage of that item actually sells (sell-through). They also have some cool widgets you can add to your site for Amazon or eBay affiliate sales. Check it out.
- Niche Market Case Study by Johnathan Leger - This post is a great example of how following the right steps of building to promotion can have a wide effect on a sites popularity and traffic in the shortest amount of time! Must Read!!
- Micro Niche Finder - While this program may be focusing on many different ways like PPC, Adsense, Blogs etc, the resources and methods Jim uses are absolutely key to every type of niche research you do!
- Magazines - A great site to research your niche! Just click through the hundreds of titles then look the info up on Google for competition etc.
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Comments
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Hi Mark,
Niche Inspector is a software created by Myleena Phan. The website is NicheInspector.com.
I have found it to be an excellent software for finding niches.
It is slightly pricey at $127 (one time) but, according to my experience, it is an absolute worthwhile buy.
Raj
Lets not forget Ebay Pulse or MPire.
A great site to research your niche is http://www.magazines.com, just click through the hundreds of titles then look the info up on Google for competition etc.
Has anyone tried/used Nichebot? Any comments or reviews?
I have a subscription to Nichebot.
One very unique feature of Nichebot is paid subscribers get to have weekly Q&A sessions with its creator Jim Morris. These are Sunday afternoons.
It provides the first 50 results from Wordtracker and allows you to drill down (dig) just like a WT subscription. A full subscription to WT will allow you to list 500 results. So, if you have a good idea how you want to drill down (your longtail), you’ll be able to work with Nichebot WT results.
What’s different is Nichebot offers multiple keyword research tools in one location - Wordtracker and KeywordDiscovery. WT and KD utilize different sources for their counts. WT only goes back 90 days, KD offers trend data for an entire year. KD offers a very extensive longtail database - Nichebot requires use of premium credits to review that data (you are allocated premium credits depending on your subscription selection).
I rarely use the premium credits, but having access to the WT’s data and KD’s long tail data is great for the subscription price. I’ve had a full subscription to WT before, but for now, Nichebot is meeting my needs.
Nichebot also offers some LSI tools - but if you want a good free LSI tool, check out ArticleJockey.com. Great for writing articles too. The creator is close with the folks over at Themezoom.com (if you’ve got $300/month you can get a subscription to TZ).
There are many more features - but just go to nichebot.com to check out all the details. I know guys who just utilize KeyWord Elite without any paid subscription services, but I prefer to have some tangible data (and it gives my SEO clientèle something tangible).
I do SEO consulting so I can justify my subscription cost to Nichebot. I’m just beginning to diversify with BANS so I’m real interested in this series.
I’ve seen the comment over and over that tools like WordTracker will provide me with 1000s of keywords. My question is, why do I need thousands of keywords to target a niche? Is this so that I can go down to the long tail end? What other need would someone have for so many keywords rather than just using the most sought few?
In case I’m completely wrong in my thinking, I assume that this list of 1000 keywords will tail off in popularity and thus value. Right?
Thanks,
Kirk
@ Kirk -
The big advantage of something like wordtracker or any of the other research tools…
It will provide a list of 1000’s of “Related” keywords and most importantly, “Related” long tail phrases. From that list of hundreds or thousands, you are able to sort them into the highest KEI (lowest competition) terms that fit into your niche market.
The lower the KEI - the easier it is to rank for a term.
I will be covering this fairly indepth on Monday as well.
Mark
Hi Mark,
I have been using this little script for sometime now on my dev machine and decided to make it free to the public.
The script will randomly pull an eBay category from a DB and list up to the top 100 searched keywords for that category. I have linked the keywords to the corresponding eBay search so you can quickly see the niche potential.
I know the “Blog Theme” is a little cheesy, but I wanted it to look different, hopefully I can get something better up in the coming weeks.
Chuck