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.  