Once you’ve compiled the list of topics you feel you could talk about every. single. day. you’ll want to narrow your list down further by evaluating the market demand and competition. You really shouldn’t start building your blog or website around a specific topic until you have done a complete evaluation and know for certain that it’s worth your time and investment to do so.

Let’s get started —

The term people type into search boxes on Google, Yahoo or any other search engine is called “keyword” or “keyword phrase.”

As an example: If you want to find a website that sells camping gear, you would enter the keyword phrase “camping gear” into the search box on Google.com and press enter.

A tool I use that makes basic searching easier is the Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com) – this allows you to search the web from your desktop without having to return to Google’s homepage with each new search. It’s free, takes seconds to install and is available in several languages. The Google Toolbar will appear in your browser window near the top and will look something like this:

google toolbar

It’s not necessary to download the toolbar, it just makes life a bit easier, in my opinion.

Although I prefer to use Google to conduct my research, you can use other search engines to assess your marketing demand, competition and eventually determine your topic of focus.

The screenshot I’m showing reveals the term “camping gear” (inside quotations for more narrow focused search) yields 3,050,000 results. However, if you scroll through the pages, you’ll find many duplications. But, camping gear looks like it might be a fairly competitive topic to develop.

camping gear search

To the contrary, let’s say you are passionate about rare birds of China – the Satyr Tragopan in particular – the same type of search yields a result that’s quite the opposite.

While much lower numbers would seem favorable to a topic, you should realize that low numbers could be an indication of low market demand and that equals lower profit.

Even if a topic has huge results in organic search results – don’t be intimidated. Large numbers of organic search engine results can sometimes be a poor indicator of actual competition. I’ll show you using an example from one of my niche’s.

  1. Organic search results may be irrelevant – “Dating” is a key term that is massive in result. Some of those results may not be about singles and dating – but more about dating products for market or dating in terms of a specific calendar date.
  2. Organic results may be outdate – Google tends to keep the oldest pages in the front because they mentioned the topic first, sometimes those pages can become outdated.
  3. Organic results are dynamic – As Google changes which pages qualify for page rank near the top of their listings, the sites that were at the top yesterday may end up being on page 15 today, or as some bloggers have experiences, removed from the search engines altogether.
  4. No one searches hundreds of pages – Studies have shown that most people will search through one, perhaps two pages  before clicking a link. That means the other thousands of links are irrelevant, thus you should consider those listed on the first couple or three pages as your truest competition.

Profitable Niche Evaluation

The best way to test the profitability of your topics is to see whether there are Internet Marketers willing to pay to advertise within that market. In general, if you see lots of advertiser competition within a niche, that market has the potential to be highly profitable.

Using Google Adwords Keyword Tool

When using this tool, you’ll want to find which keywords surfers are searching for and how often those keywords are searched. You can start by using Google’s keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. I share a screenshot below:

google keyword tool

This next screenshot shows the results of that search:

google keyword tool results

The Advertiser Competition box is the one you’ll want to pay close attention to here. The boxes that are slightly colored show there is some competition, but not a great deal.

The lack of competition for the term is explained by the fact that Search Volume in both Local and Global is extremely low if existent at all.

Further down, you see Google offers Additional Keywords to Consider, even those don’t yield much return to indicate the competition or interest is great enough to proceed.

One thing I like to encourage my clients or readers to do is to think of a department store. Think of the price tags on various products that might surround your niche topic. If the price tags vary from low to high – you could be looking at a profitable niche. If there’s little to no product that may be of interest to readers of your niche – you’ll probably be hard pressed to find advertisers.

You can explore potential advertisers by conducting a search on your select term. Look in the Google results for “Sponsored Listings” – the listings will be located in the colored section above the organic search results and on the right side of the page.

From that list of sponsors, most times you can detect the "affiliate sites” because they will be using terms such as:

  • Top 10
  • Best of
  • Rated
  • Reviews
  • Compare
  • Buy Now

If you want to find more affiliate sites you can search for “your niche topic reviewed” and “your niche topic guide” as shown below:

  • Dating sites reviewed
  • Compare Travel Packages

Once you have done your homework on your preferred topics and evaluate the competition and profit potential – you’ll be able to make a much wiser decision in the direction you wish to take.

Do you have a preferred method of determining your topic? If so, I’d love to hear.

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Originally posted 2009-08-19 21:51:57.

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