Amazon - http://www.amazon.com Amazon is a great place to see what currently exists for any given sub-niche. Chances are, the more books there are written on that subject, the more that market spends on those topics. For example: First I specify “Books” to search. Then I enter my niche, in this case “crafts.” Uh oh. There are WAY too many books returned. This niche is not targeted enough. It is too “mainstream.” Much better! There are possibilities here. We now suspect the following:
1) This sub-niche may be targeted enough.
2) This sub-niche may spend money
Time to scope it out a little further. We want to be as certain as we possibly can that our niche is focused enough but big enough, and that the people in that niche spend money. So next I head over to the Overture Resource Center (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch) and click on the “Keyword Selector Tool.” Then I enter my niche and see how many times that keyword and all related keywords were searched in the previous month. I like to see at least 10,000 searches for all keywords combined, but not more than, say, 50,000 or so (although I do have profitable niches that have only a few thousand searches at Overture, but they are the exception rather than the rule). For “latch rug”, you can see that this market is just too small.
Remember that Overture searches are for Yahoo and their partner sites, so to measure the number of searches on Google, I usually estimate between 5 and 10 times this number to come up with Google’s searches. Also, depending on the market, I've sometimes found Overture’s figures somewhat inflated, so bear in mind that the number of actual searches might be lower. If I’m happy with the number of searches for this potential niche, I next want to see how much pay per clicks (PPC) are going to cost me on Google Adwords. For that I use Overture’s “View Bids Tool.” I want to make sure I won’t have to pay more than a dollar or two per click on average, but of course what you can profitably pay for PPC will depend on your product’s selling price and how many you can sell. Again, at this point I’m just trying to get a snapshot or pulse of this market. Plus, the bid process also tells you a little about the moneymaking opportunities of a market.
As a loose rule, if the max bid results are between 30 cents and $2.00, it’s a good indicator that people are making money in this market. I call this my “magic window.” Over $2.00 means that the competition is too fierce for my tastes, but depending on your market and eventual product selling price and demand, it may make sense for you. To check on the companies that are bidding on my keywords in Google Adwords, I use http://www.googspy.com. One relative newcomer as a research tool is Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends). There’s lots of useful information here. You can see that the news volume is synced with the search volume, and several notable news articles are displayed, along with where they occurred on the timeline. In the lower section, you can see which countries, cities, and languages made the most searches. Be aware that the indicators are normalized, meaning they are adjusted for that region’s population. For example, South Africa has about 44 million people, compared with the U.S.’s 295 million. So the U.S. may
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