Hello All. I’m John Mann, an Affiliate Marketer and the Affiliate Manager for Michael Brown’s TheProfitHQ.com affiliate program. You might have seen Paul’s review of Michael’s program Niche Blitzkrieg on this site. Niche Blitzkrieg is a course that teaches you how to make money as an Affiliate Marketer selling other people’s products and making commissions by doing so.
Well, part of that course is learning how to research new niche markets and I’m going to discuss how you can go and research new niche markets to see “how tough” the competition will be to get a new site of yours onto the first page of Google for different desired keyword phrases.
Backtracking a bit, niche marketing is merely choosing a narrow selection of possible customers and then finding keywords that they might be typing into the search engines to find products of interest to them to buy.
For example, someone typing in the term “dogs” is not a very narrow niche. Who knows what these folks are searching for. It might be pictures of their favorite breed or information on dog nutrition or ways to train their dog. But someone typing in the phrase “how to train my dog to stop peeing on the rug” … well, there’s a narrow niche market. You can tell exactly what this person wants from their search term and now you could put together a site selling a training manual someone else has written and is selling through Clickbank, for instance.
That’s niche marketing.
You might be familiar with the Bum Marketing method that a very intelligent Affiliate Marketer named Travis Sago put together a couple of years ago. In it, Travis mentions a way to analyze your competition is to enter a keyword phrase in quotes into Google and to see how many competing sites there are that are optimized for that particular term.
Well, I believe that while this common approach is the first step in research, it doesn’t tell the whole story about how competitive that potential niche is.
First of all, we want our new website to rank on the first page of the Google (and Yahoo and MSN!) SERPs (Search Engine Results pages). So even if a niche looks competitive – Travis advises to look for one with around 1000 competing sites or less – what happens if the Top Ten on Google are very big and well known authority sites? There is no way it will be an easy job for us to compete effectively with big-time established sites that have a TON of backlinks pointing at them from around the web.
In my opinion, you need to analyze the competition on Google’s first page to get a better understanding of how tough it’ll be for you to crack the Top Ten with your new website.
The Top Ten are called natural or organic search results – they are the results you see on the left hand side of the SERPs versus the paid ads on the right hand side like Google AdWords. Getting our new niche marketing website to the Top Ten natural results means free traffic to our site … that’s our goal here.
Here’s Michael’s system for analyzing the competition for the Top Ten.
First, do a search on Google for the keyword term you’re considering but in quotes. Like “how to train my dog” actually leaving the quotes in.
This will bring up the Top Ten in Google for this term.
First off, I see that there are just under 12,000 competing websites … an indication of a little bit of competition but remember, that knowledge is just a starting point.
Now here’s the process Michael and I both use and recommend to find out the “strength” of our Top Ten competitors. Let’s discuss the factors that contribute to these webistes getting their Top Ten ranking. I’ll discuss how our procedure is performed manually versus saving time using our software product called Niche Research Commando which analyzes the Top Ten in seconds.
First, look at each of the Top Ten websites in the search results. Are they using the keyword phrase in the title of their site and in the description that the SERPs shows? Sites using the keyword phrase usually get a higher ranking. If we were doing this manually, we’d create a spreadsheet to hold information on the Top Ten and we’d included two columns for using the keyword in their title and using the keyword in their description with a yes/no for each site being analyzed.
Next, manually visit each site. If you are using Firefox as your browser, you can get a free plugin for it that will display the Google Pagerank of the website by visiting http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/
A site’s pagerank is basically an indication of how important Google views the site as so for our purposes, the higher the pagerank, the better a website shows up in the SERPs. Make a third column in your spreadsheet and enter the pagerank for each of the Top Ten. This is part of your niche research that takes a bit of time to do manually but it is important to know if you’re trying to compete for a Top Ten result.
Next we need to know how many backlinks each website has pointing at it from other websites around the web. Right now this is one of the most important factors contributing to a higher SERPs ranking and again it’s a bit time consuming to do manually but very important. If you go through this manually, you’ll see why we developed Niche Research Commando.
Copy the url for the first website in the Top Ten. Right now, using “how to train my dog” as my keyword phrase (using the quotes) I see that the top site is http://www.43things.com/things/view/19431/train-my-dog which has a pagerank of PR3. Now I go to Yahoo to find out how many backinks are pointing at the site. In the Yahoo search window I type “link:http://www.43things.com/things/view/19431/train-my-dog” (without the quotes) and then I hit enter.
Next, you’ll see a dropdown box you’ll need to change from “From All Pages” to “Except from this domain”. For the website I’m using for this example, I see that there is only one backlink pointing at this site. That’s good for us … it means that we should probably be able to beat this website with only a few backlinks pointing at our new website. How to generate these backlinks which is a very big part of Search Engine Optimization right now is part of what Michael covers in Niche Blitzkrieg.
Enter the number of backlinks into the fourth column in your spreadsheet and then repeat the process for grabbing pagerank and backlinks for each website in the Top Ten. Again, the manual process takes time and effort … that’s why we developed Niche Research Commando.
Here’s a screenshot of what Commando tells us for the Top Ten example we’ve been using:
You’ll see that Commando shows the 11,800 competing websites in the upper right hand corner and then the information for each of the sites in the Top Ten. This information would lead me to believe that the example niche we’ve been looking at would be one we could compete in very effectively if we wanted to.
One other final note about Commando – if you’re interested in saving the data it gathers as an Excel spreadsheet like I spoke about in the manual method, you can do so with the simple click of the button labeled “Save”. Commando really is a time saver for anyone doing niche market research!
Well, that’s the end of my mini-lesson in niche market research. Obviously anyone interested in actually doing nich research for a new website would want more information on the entire process and that’s what Niche Blitzkrieg is all about. It’s an online course that teaches you exactly how to make money with Niche Marketing using videos and text lessons.
You can Click Here to get more information (as well as Special Pricing for WorkAtHomeTruth visitors) on Niche Blitzkrieg and Click Here to get more information on Niche Research Commando.
See you down the line.
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