Tools for Aid in Finding Profitable Niches and Keywords
14 March 08
photo by moriza
During the past week, I’ve gotten a few questions from readers concerning discovering niche topics. Well, the word ‘discover’ may seem to imply that one might be able to find a profitable niche by sheer chance. While this may indeed be possible, do you really want to risk wasting your time, effort, and money by taking a blind leap?
If your definition of success is making decent money off of your websites, in this case we’re talking niche blogs, it’s proven that keyword and niche research [among a few other things] is imperative for success. Writing great content about a subject you love and have a passion for just isn’t enough.
Just how can you find a highly searched keyword to base your niche on? How would you be able to estimate the profitableness of that specific keyword?
Keyword Research | Suggestion Tools
If you’re not ready to dish out money for paid services just yet, one free tool that I like to use is SEO book Keyword Suggestion Tool. I like using it because it’s fairly easy to understand. Here’s a screenshot for a search I did for the term ‘Make Money Online’. *I used this term purely for example purposes and am NOT suggesting this as a niche topic
This keyword tool spells out for you the daily estimates of searches done for a specific term at Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It also provides links to Google and Yahoo tools such as Google Trends and the AdWords keyword tool, which nearly brings me to my next featured tool…
Before I go into the next tool, if you’d like to use tools that are more feature-filled and will save you some research time, there are premium online keyword research tools available such as Wordze and Wordtracker.
These services are fairly powerful (which is why they’ll cost you some), and they have great tutorials (in both text and video) on just how to use their tools. You’re looking at about somewhere around $45-60/month for these premium services.
If you don’t want to take my word for it, both Wordze and Wordtracker come highly recommended by the likes of SEO guru Aaron Wall, and Courtney Tuttle himself swears by Wordze.
Anyway, now for sizing up just how much a keyword may be worth
AdWords Keyword Tool
If you’re planning to monetize your niche blog with AdSense, the AdWords Keyword Tool will help you estimate just how much a keyword’s CPC (cost-per-click) is worth, and thus, how much money you’ll make every time someone clicks on an Adsense ad on your site.
Around the AdWords Keyword Tool page
When you get to the AdWords Keyword Tool page, do a search for the term you’ll be aiming for. Once the results are in, you should see your keyword and a bunch of suggested related terms in a list, along with the Advertiser Competition and the Search Volume statistics. Basically, the more green you see filling the bars under those stats, the better.
Show Estimated Avg. CPC
To find out the CPC (cost-per-click) of the terms listed, there should be a box just above the list of keyword terms and such entitled filter my results. Under it there is an option menu titled choose columns to display.
Click on the drop down menu and select Show Estimated Avg. CPC. After doing this, type in the dollar amount of the maximum CPC you would like displayed (if you’re not sure, just type in 100.00) in the respective box, and hit Calculate.
Once you do this, there should be dollar amounts next to the keyword terms in the list. This dollar amount should give you an idea of how much money you’ll be getting for clicks on those terms in Adsense (note that you’ll very likely be getting less than this amount).
More Niche Research Resources
I’m very away that I’ve only begun to barely scratch the surface on [profitable] niche blogging and tools to use in this post.
Micro Niche Finder
I stumbled across a program called Micro Niche Finder a few weeks ago. It claims to be able to uncover overlooked and untapped niche markets. It sounds interesting, and it’s somewhat tempting to purchase. However, I haven’t yet tried it so I can’t personally vouch for how good this product is. I’ll do more research before I make a final decision on whether or not to purchase it. If you’ve tried Micro Niche Finder, do let us know how well it performed for you in the comments section below.
Good Free Info
If you’d like to find great free online resources for information to help you get started, and don’t mind doing a good amount of reading, I’ll point you in the way towards great non-horse crap reads…
Mr. Grizzly Brears has a great blog on how to make money online, and if you delve through the articles he has posted there, you’ll find almost everything you need to know for starting your quest on that very topic…making money online.
I pretty much do what I preach, and can truthfully say that I’ve read almost every article there…almost.
To point you towards a more topic-specific article, check out Finding Niche Markets and follow the breadcrumbs trail.
Well, that’s a wrap for now. I’m always open to feedback whether they be constructive disagreements…or agreements…
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I find the tips about mini sites on SelfMadeMinds.com to be really useful too. Basically reading news and magazines in areas that interest you can help you identify up and coming technology/ideas too.
Niche words. The only way to truly be successfull at standing out from the crowd in a search.
For some reason my blog gets a ton of “Strip +Search +Airport” queries from Google everyday. I don’t know why people are searching for that, but either way, I plant keywords all over my site now for it, and its a tech-fashion blog!!
A.