Effectively Researching your Niche Market

In my previous post, I discussed just a few methods of Discovering a Niche Market. The sum meaning of the entire post, was to encourage you to simply look around yourself, there are niches all around us in every day life! To that point, I was cooking a little dinner last night, ok… they were hot dogs… nonetheless, I looked right in front of me and thought about my Gas Grill! I looked at the assortment of utensils I had to work on the grill, the cover I had to remove to get to the grill, and then thought about how many times, or parts I had replaced during my adult years to keep a grill running! (I like Hot Dogs :-))

I think I may have burned a few things as I ran in the house to get my notepad. As you recall.. I forget things quickly, and after all, eating was more important than anything else at that point!

During this section of the Step by Step affiliate guide, we are going to dig deep into he broad category of ”Grills” to find out:

• Is there demand for a Grill releated Niche?
• Do they sell on eBay & worth the affiliate commission?
• How competitive is the existing market?
• The value of WordTracker.
• MANY additional Niche Discovery essentials!

Lets get started!

Before I get into the mindset of what I will discuss today, I wanted to go back to one portion of yesterdays post. I talked briefly about my friend Greg, and the niche he helped uncover. The estate sale had a table full of “Fenton Glassware“. That is now a new project that will be developed following this step by step guide, by my 15 year old son. He has zero experience with BANS, SEO, Niche marketing etc, and it will be a good source of feedback for me on how well I am explaining things! (AND I get a free site developed when it is done!)

I also encourage ALL of you to follow along using either the niche I am talking about (to learn) or by using your OWN potential niche to get a jump start on the development! I have also registered a domain for this project already, and will reveal the domain during a future section when I discuss how to register a domain name. (Tomorrow :-))

Tools used in this section:

• eBay Pulse 
• eBay Marketplace Research
  Subscription service for eBay store owners, alternate method is TeraPeak Service.
• Google Search Engine
• WordTracker Keyword Discovery Tool
  I am using the paid version, there is also a less detailed free wordtracker discovery tool.
• Google Sandbox Tool
• Spreadsheet application for Keyword sorting
  MS Excel is what I use, but Google Docs is available free with a Google account.

Begin Researching your Niche Market
Now that we have an idea of the various tools needed for your Niche Research, lets first head over to eBay Pulse. Inside the eBay Pulse screens, all we are going to do is look to see if there is ANY demand for our newly found Niche market! I have created a fully commented, step by step flash video of the process, which can be viewed here. (Large File, must have flash plugin)

Once we see that items within our “Broad Niche” (grills) are actively being searched for and sold on eBay, it is time to research a bit further and see what kind of cost they are being sold for as well as the demand metrics or how often they are being sold! I have an eBay store and access to highly detailed metric reports through a subscription based “Marketplace Research” utility. You can also use a subscription based TeraPeak Service for detailed metrics, which has a FREE version, I have not used it myself, but I assume by the screenshots the metrics are very similar, if not identical!

From the above research, we have determined that the broad niche term “Grills” has high popularity, high sales volume, and high average selling price! It also contains MANY “keyphrases” that when expanded upon, will help us drill into our Niche Market!

Does Build a Niche Store Competition already Exist?
At this point in my own research, I like to pause for quick second to see if other BANS stores already exist with the broad niche. To do this, I go right to Google. In the search box, I type: “Grills” and “Build a Niche Store” (note the quotes around both terms) and press the search button. This should provide me with a results page showing websites that contain BOTH phrases. Looking in the upper right of Google, I can see that approximately 1650 pages contain both terms. I then scroll down the list to identify a BANS store… in this case, the first store is the  3-4th link, mattressandcoir (dot) com. Upon visiting the site, it is a general store, and clearly not optimized for the Niche. I will do this for 3-4 of the listings on the first page of Google results to see if any of the sites listed are fully optimized, ie; BANS competition. Taking it one step farther, I narrow the search in google to “Gas Grills” and “Build a Niche Store”, finding only 219 index pages within the results, and several of the first page results non-optimized for the niche!

By doing this very vague search, I have determined I will pursue this as a Build a Niche Store website, and begin keyword discovery of the Niche market!

Niche Market Keyword Discovery
So… at this point, we know that there is demand within eBay, we also know that while there may be other sites out there, there is plenty of room for a fully search optimized competitor to get into the market! Now is the time to begin drilling deeper into the broad term of “Grill” and develop the baseline for a Targeted Niche Store!

There is a short flash based video on the right side that will walk you step by step, through the intial discovery process as you begin narrowing the Niche into a marketable website! I have included a few references to other applications in the video, however, I still feel very stongly about WordTracker as the best and most efficient resource for keyword and key phrase discovery.

It all Starts with a Single Keyword – “Grill”
Using wordtracker or whichever source of keyword discovery you choose, start with the most basic of searches. At this point, you want to return AS MANY results as possible that include the word “Grill” (Yes, we may even get a few that have to do with dentistry!) In the flash video, I chose to search for 100 results, that was only for the purpose of speeding up this video. When I prepared the list (linked below) for this article, I used the 1000 term option and narrowed it down after the video was completed. There is usually gold hidden in the phrases with less than 25 daily searches, and they all come in handy!

I also want to mention that for myself, the fastest way to work within wordtracker is to generate all your word lists  and export them to spreadsheets. Once you have them in spreadsheet form, you can sort, filter, and delete, much quicker and easier. You will ultimately WANT these large lists for marketing anyhow. By the time you are completely done with niche discovery, you will likely have 5-10 lists of 300 or more quality phrases each! (Very tedious, but rewarding process!) You can expect to spend 10-15 minutes on each list.

**Stop here and get a pen/pencil and paper for related keywords that will be uncovered!

Once you have your initial list in front of you, you will want to spend the next 15 minutes quickly browsing and removing ALL references that are not remotely related to your niche. In other words, we have no interest in Macaroni Grill (restaurant) or Jeep Cherokee Grill (car parts but hey, possibly another niche for the future!). As you are going through the list, you will likely spot several other phrases that are related. In this case, I saw gas, barbeque, bbq, and charcoal, listed many times. (There are many others) You should write these related terms down on your pad as you proceed. Once you have checked off all that do not apply, delete them and refresh your screen. This is your first list of opportunity phrases!

Within the flash tutorial, I refer to Google Adwords Sandbox and Wikipedia as just two additional places you can look to discover additional phrases that may be related to this particular niche. There are literally hundreds of websites that focus on finding related terms to your niche. In addition, wordtracker has a separate function named “Keyword Universe” that finds lateral phrases very well, as long as you use for the phrase reference only. The actual search result data however is somewhat antiquated due to the age of the overture data.

When we started this section, I had one word, “Grill”.  During the discovery process, I chose to focus on a few additional words, “gas”, “barbeque”, “bbq”, and “charcoal”. I repeated the exact process for each individual word as I did for grill by adding it to the phrase thus narrowing each term into smaller, high KEI phrase lists. I also watched for mispelled words, that were closely related (barbque) Now, we have 6 long lists of key words and phrases and we can determine which to use in narrowing our Niche! Gas Grill, Barbeque grill, charcoal grill, bbq grill. From here… you guessed it, start again with the longer term phrases listed above and you will begin to see very specific product level searches starting to appear.

I have copied all of my own work over to a Google Docs Spreadsheet and made it publicly available for viewing. You can click the image to the right to see an image of the file. You MUST have a google account in order to view the document, which is free to sign up for. If you already have Adsense, Adwords or even GMail, you already have the account! :-)

As you look at the spreadsheet, you will see I have about 1000 terms in the sheet. ALL terms include a portion of our words above, Gas Grill, Barbeque Grill, Charcoal Grill, and BBQ Grill. I have it sorted in order of HIGHEST KEI to the Lowest. This means the terms that should be easiest to rank for are at the top of the sheet, since they have the least competition (Highest KEI).

I have also color coded a few boxes… the rest will be completed during another edition of this guide.

• Yellow Boxes – These terms are the most common occurances of our targets, thus they will eventually make good <h2> Header Categories.
• Green Boxes – These terms are MANUFACTURER specific category headers. ie: Weber, Ducane, Napolean, Jennair, etc
• Orange Boxes – These terms are PRODUCT specific titles. ie: Weber 310A Gas Grill, or Vermont Castings VM600 Grill, etc.
• Blue Boxes – These terms are not product specific and will be used in the future for articles and or other search engine and visitor fodder we want to provide through the website. Ex: Homemade Gas Grills, Barbeque Chicken Recipes, etc.

As you can see, I only went a few levels into the spreadsheet at this point. Even though I am discovering the viability and focus of the Niche, a side benefit is that we have a large list of terms that will come in handy in the near future, when we begin optimization of the store. Before the end of this series, that specific spreadsheet will be used as a roadmap toward the success of the “Grill” Build a Niche Store website and help us drill very deep into product and category selection, designed to deliver the best possible results in the shortest amount of time! In all likelyhood, we will revisit keyword dicovery and wordtracker at least 2-3 more times!

I know I spent all this time explaining one way you can discover whether a market is “Niche-Worthy”. We have definitely determined that the Grills category, while it is still in a broad form, has high potential for earnings! It is very search popular, has moderate to low competition across several manufacturer and product specific terms, and is full of requests from the searching public on ways to learn more or do grilling better! we also saw that eBay is chuck full of Grill related auctions that sell in high volume and the average selling price is one that will deliver very nice affiliate commissions!

So, why didn’t I just tell you all that there is another VERY QUICK and easy way to detemine if this is Niche-Worthy? Simple, you MUST know very indepth details about your Niche or potential niche market BEFORE you start developing the site! They would never build a home without a blueprint, McDonalds wont even make a hamburger without a plan… you should have one too! The easy way to determine if your idea is niche-worthy?

• Open Google and search for “Grill” (quotes required) 77,800,000 results (Not much of a niche)
• Change “Grill” to “Gas Grill” 1,680,000 results (Still not too good)
• Change it to “Weber Gas Grill” 87,000 (getting better!)
• Change it to “Weber E310 gas Grill” 3 results (Bingo!)
• Change it to “Vermont Castings Grill” 10,100 results (Not bad)
• Change it to “Vermont Castings VM600″ 98 results (Jackpot!)
• “Vermont Castings VM600 Grill” 0 results! (Big Winner!)

You see where this went real fast? We simply took what wordtracker tells us people are searching for and looked it up ourselves. The “Quotes” around the search string are telling the search engine – give me VERY SPECIFIC results. Without the quotes.. the engine just looks for each occurance of the individual words. It is not a perfect measure of worthiness, but it is a very fast and easy test you can use in the future!

The next segment in this series will involve registering the new domain name for the Grills Niche Store. That particular segment should take only 10 minutes from start to finish, so you will have plenty of extra time in your day to continue researching your own niche!

Please feel free to add comments about this article – I love to hear what you all think, good, bad, or otherwise! I will never claim to be the expert in anything as there is always someone doing it a smarter way! THAT is how I learn to improve myself! :-)

Mark

Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:

• Save on Gas – Supplement your Income with a Profitable Niche Market
• Build a Niche Store Empire Series in 12 Weeks – Niche Market Research Continued
• Build a Niche Store Empire Series in 12 Weeks – Niche Market Research
• 50 Ways to Discover and Research a Niche Market
• Build a Niche Store Empire Series in 12 Weeks – Niche Market Discovery Part 1
• Find a Niche Market with Google Insights
• Choosing a Niche Market for Build a Niche Store

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