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Finding a Niche Market

By: Austin Delaney

It's amazing how many times people will start a business because they figure everyone will want what they have to offer.

They didn't do any research first and literally cost themselves thoudands of dollars - dollars they could have avoided wasting if they'd followed some very simple rules to begin with.

1) See if there is a market

In days of yore, times gone by, and actually anytime before 1994 it wasn't so easy to do simple market research. You did have to spend money, sometimes lots of it, to find out if your product or service had a chance of being successful.

Today we have the wonder of Internet marketing and God-like search engines - Google knows everything don't you know. But just because they do, it doesn't mean they'll tell us mere mortals.

No, but Yahoo will and that is all we need. They provide a free keyword research tool (Overture keyword selector) that will tell us just how many people have been searching for a specific keyword term.

Head on over to Overture - type in your main keyword and you'll get a list of searches made over the course of a month with the amount of times they were looked up in Yahoo.

Anything over 500 is good, depending on how specific your search term is.

As a rule of thumb just multiple by three to determine the amount of searches made on Google for the same keyword (sometimes it's much much higher).

Google does lend a hand when we have to find related terms to our main keywords - and then we just run these through Overture as well.

Simply enter your main keyword in the form at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

2) Is it a buyers market?

We can use eBay for this. Whatever you feel about eBay there's no denying that it represents global consumer market forces. If it's selling on eBay it's selling elsewhere.

We simply type in our main keyword search term at eBay and click 'search'. This will return a list of items for sale on eBay at that moment.

We can use eBay's advanced search options to further drill down the value of the items we are interested in.

3) Can we compete out in the open?

We've determined that people are searching for our product or service, we've established that they're actually buying it too (hurrah!) and now we need to find out if we stand a chance of being heard above the noise.

Back to Google it is then.

After we put in our search query we will see 'Personalized results 1-10' and a large number beside it. This is the amount of pages in the Google index that contain our main keyword.

But that won't tell us much. So we use advanced search query techniques to find out the real competition.

To do this use - intitle:"our keyword" - in the Google search box.

This will give us a number of the amount of pages in Google with our keyword in the 'title' of the web page. It's well known that Google will favor pages with the main keyword when listing results.

What's not so well known is that Google also looks at the name of the web page itself eg, 'mypage.html'. This is called the 'anchor'.

So we do a new search - intitle:"our keyword" inanchor:"our keyword"

This will list pages that are named after the keyword and also have the keyword in the title. All we have to do is name our page after our keyword and make sure it is in the 'title' to give it a good chance of ranking in Google.

Anything less than '500' results and it's easy enough to get a top 10 ranking.

Article Source: http://www.webmarketingiq.com

To boost our ranking we simply need to get some decent backlinks and I show you how to do this very easily at www.buildonewaylinks.info Austin is a proactive Internet Marketer with a long history in software design and development for Internet services. Current projects he's involved in are www.arrowconceptsmarketing.com (an affiliate software system) and an eBay keywords tool at www.lostinthemix.co.uk/searchcart - a powerful tool for finding valuable niches on eBay.

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