How To Research A Niche Market

Getting people to your website is a very important skill.
It's not just about writing content and generating a buzz
around it, although those are important skills too. 

The work begins way before you start writing on your site,
as you need to find the perfect niche - the subject of your
website. Niche research is about finding profitable subjects
that are broad enough to write enough content about, yet
narrow enough for you to become an authority on the topic. 

A great way to establish the popularity of a niche market is
to use the Google AdWords keyword tool. Simply type in the
name of the niche and you will see the number of searches
performed each month, along with lots of related keywords. 

If you sign in to the tool, you will also see the average
price you would expect to pay to advertise on the front page
of Google for each term. This should give you a feel for how
much money there is to be made in the niche you have chosen
to research. 

There are a number of ways to find out how much competition
you will face if you launch a site in a particular niche
market. For a very quick and broad estimation, simply search
for the niche name in speech marks in Google.

The higher the number of results returned, the more
competition is out there. Of course, this doesn't give you
much insight into the quality of the competition, just the
quantity. 

To get a more reliable indication of how tough a keyword
will be to rank for in search results, there are free tools
to download, popular ones include Market Samurai and Traffic
Travis. These will analyze things like how many inbound
links are pointing to sites already ranking for the niche
terms.

This gives a far more accurate picture of competition, but
can take a while to fully research. 

By doing your niche research properly, you will save time
and effort. Focusing on the wrong markets will usually
result in poor results, namely profit. When you find a niche
market with plenty of search volume, good advertiser spend
and relatively low competition, you have truly found your
niche.  