Okay everybody, welcome back to The Faster Webmaster. My name is Erik Stafford and in this second Session we are going to be talking about how to choose and research niche markets. So what are niche markets?

Niche markets are specific areas of high interest. Think about it, and see if you can come up with one. Can you think of any one subject that people are super-passionate about?

My good friend Joshua Shafran high-passion markets "oholic" markets: markets where people are so interested in something that they are not rational about it, rather they are "oholic" about it. "Choc-oholics" love chocolate, for example. "Dog-oholics" love dogs. I went to Ohio State, and so of course I love Ohio State Football. I am not rational about it... I am "Buckeye-oholic". As a result, I have Buckeye bumper stickers, shirts, coffee mugs, and so on and so forth.

If you work in that niche, chances are good
that you have some of my money in your wallet right now.

Finding these markets can be a tough chore because many people have unique interests that they are emotionally attached to, and therefore want to base a business on them. While this is admirable, and in theory a good idea, in the competitive online business world it doesn't always work.

You must find a topic that people want to read. Better yet, a topic people must read.

When you are first sitting down trying
to decide what market you are going to work in,
you want to make sure of one thing:

That the market you are interested in has enough of an audience to sustain your efforts in it. For example: you might be super interested in Hissing Cockroaches. Don't laugh: my roomate in college was (shudder). Are there enough people in the world that are interested in that subject? Is it worth it to create products about Hissing Cockroaches?

Only research will tell you the answer to this question.

As you do some research it will become clear that a lot of topics will not be very marketable for many different reasons. For instance, perhaps there isn’t really any interest in it or perhaps there is so much interest that the topic is saturated. Saturated markets are difficult at best to break into and you should ask yourself if it’s worth the frustration when there are so many good niche areas available to you.

So where to begin? How do you find a topic that will sell like hotcakes?

I want you to grab a pen and sheet of paper and make a list of all of the things that you enjoy, know something about, or are good at doing.

When you can’t think of another thing to jot down, ask a friend or family member what they think you are good at doing. Sometimes our friends and family know us better than we know ourselves! Why did I ask you to do this? Simple. Look at the list you just put together... you will be amazed at how many words from your list might be a potential niche market.

Here is the research process that we are going to take with this list of words:

1. Check popular online retailers to see what others are doing with these markets. We want to get an idea of the categories and sub-categories, and what sort of products are being sold.
2. Check the major online affiliate centers. This will give us a list of competing products and services.
3. Check our shortened list against a free keyword tracker tool. This will give us a rough idea of how many people are searching for related information.
4. Check Google for competition. It is a good clue that you might be onto a good topic if you see advertisers paying money to get their website and product in front of the browsing public.

These four steps will determine if there is a profitable market for you to attack.

I typically handle this step of the process at either Ebay, or Amazon. These are two great starting points for researching practically any product. You can research a topic you have in mind (to gauge the popularity of it), or you can use these two mega-online retail websites to discover new niche topics.

- watch the video for this step - Having trouble watching this video? Click here for help installing the proper plug-ins.

Let’s use the example "Jewelry". Go to Ebay (www.ebay.com) and in the big search window at the top of the page type in "Jewelry". Make sure to search all categories, and click "Search"... you should see something that looks like this:

Image #1 - Niche Research on Ebay. The keyword "Jewelry"
has almost 30,000 results as I write this.

The keyword "Jewelry" has almost 30,000 results as I write this. That's not going to work for us yet: It's too generic of a term, with too many results. You can bet that huge Jewelry companies (with marketing budget's much bigger than yours) are already competing heavily for that keyword. It's a great start... but we need something more specific.

See the breakdown of all the sub-categories in that topic area? Vintage, Antique, Rings, Necklaces... on and on and on. This tells me that there is a good amount of interest in this subject... You can drill down, browse around, and make some notes.

Check your results on Amazon as well... and once you have 5-10 good “niches” move right along to step #2!

Once you have your list of 5-10 ideas you need to take your results to one of the big online affiliate management websites. There are quite a few of them... but I want you to start with ClickBank. Clickbank lists digital products only: E-Books, audio training, stuff like that (We will get into physical products in a little bit).

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CLICK ON THIS LINK TO VISIT CLICKBANK

When you get to the website, in the upper-right hand corner, you will see a link that says "Marketplace". When you click on this link you will see a form which will allow you to search the ClickBank Marketplace (Image #2).

Image #2 - The ClickBank Marketplace.

This is basically a product search where you can search for similar products in your field, industry, or area of interest. I am going to use "Yoga" as my example keyword in this step, so in the "Keywords" field, go ahead and type in "Yoga" and click "Go".

As you can see,there are several Yoga results. (Image #3) You will see them listed down the page along with a bunch of information about each product.

Image #3 - ClickBank Marketplace results for
the search keyword "Yoga"

Take a look at the first product listed. At the time I am writing this, the first product listed is called "The Magic Of Finger Yoga".

Here is what the items in green mean:

• $/sale: This is the average amount earned by each Affiliate per sale. This amount takes into account refunds and taxes. Basically, this is what you will make for each sale you refer to this product.


• %/sale: This is the percentage of the cost of the item that is paid to an Affiliate as commission for a sale. So, for example, if the "$/sale" of an item is $11.98, and the publisher is offering affiliates a "%/sale" of 50%... then you can pretty much estimate that the product cost (to the consumer) is $11.98 x 2, plus whatever ClickBank takes as a transaction fee. So the first product that comes up in our Yoga search ("The Magic Of Finger Yoga") is going to cost consumers roughly $27.00.


• %refd: The percentage of the publisher's sales that come from Affiliates.


• grav: This is a weighted count of Affiliates who have actually made sales of the product. Generally, the bigger this number is, the bigger number of the Affiliates who have promoted it.

So go ahead and click the link under one of the products and " view the pitch page". You should see a sales page for a yoga product (Image #4)... and a link at the bottom that says order now.

Image #4 - "The Magic Of Finger Yoga" is a ClickBank product.

This is a ClickBank product about yoga. It is being sold for $27 and as you saw when you completed your search, the owner of this product is paying 50% commissions. So if you were to refer someone to this product, ClickBank would take a small percentage as a processing fee, and you would earn 50% of the difference.

Each referral sale you make of this product is worth about $12 bucks in your pocket. Click on the "Order" link, and you will see verification of what we suspected: A payment page with a price of $27.00. (Image #5)

Image #5 -We were right: A ClickBank product with a "$/sale"
of $11.98, and a "%/sale" of 50% costs $27.00

Go back to your search results and you will see several other Yoga products: "yoga health secrets", "yoga weight loss secrets", etc. etc. (Image #6) Most of the prices on these referrals are quite low. I prefer to promote products where the commission is higher.

Image #6 - More "Yoga" results. Not a lot here!

Also, if you scroll down, you will see after the third or fourth product, the stats disappear. What that tells me is that you are no longer dealing with clean, straight-forward sales pages. These links can’t give you any information about what these products cost, what you will earn by promoting them, or how well they have done in the past. Also, you will notice that there is no back, next, forward or last links at the bottom of the page.

There is only one page of results.

What that tells me is that ClickBank only has 10 products on yoga and half of them are not going to convert well. There are no stats to show you what percentage of commission you will earn.  That tells me that Yoga might not be a good niche to work in, in terms of ClickBank.

As another test, lets type in "Dog". When you type in dog and hit "Go" and search the Marketplace, you will see many pages filled with products (Image #7). Not only that, but most of them can give you commission percentages and the amounts. "Dog food secrets", "How I trained my dog in one evening", "Canine grooming tips", "Dog owners manual", "Dog training home study course"... on and on and on. Many of these products will pay you $20-$40 per referral... which is quite nice.

Image #7 - Now that's a hot market!

You will also see that there are several pages of results. (Image #8) This tells me that "Dogs" may be a good niche or market to be working with. There is certainly an audience for it, and competitors as well. Competitors that you can promote, and earn affiliate commissions! Competitors you can cross promote with as well.

Image #8 - Multiple pages of results. Rock on!

Once you are finished researching related digital products at Clickbank, it's time to research some physical products. There are basically three big online affiliate centers that handle affiliate programs for physical products, and any of them will work fine:

• Commission Junction
• Share A Sale
• Linkshare

Visit one of these three websites, signup for a free account, and then search your keywords for related physical products that you can sell and earn a commission on. As you can see (Image #9) Commission Junction has seventeen companies listed that offer "Yoga" related products.

Image #9 - Commission Junction.

This step will probably rule out a few of your options from the first step, but that's good. Our goal is to drill down and end up with a few niche markets that we know are going to work. Take those that have passed the test so far and move on to the next step!

Why similar physical and digital products
are actually a good thing:

When you new to this process it's natural to look at your research results
from this step and think "That's a lot of competition!"
and get discouraged...

Believe it or not, lots of results in this step is a good thing. For example: Say you write an E-Book on Yoga. Armed with this knowledge, you could strongly recommend a Yoga mat or Yoga clothing that you found on Commission Junction, and earn commissions on each sale. You could also create a section in your product called "Additional Reading" or "Resources", and recommend a few digital products from Clickbank as well. Cha-Ching! More commissions.

These "multiple streams of income" are the lifeblood of any online business.

Okay, so you created a list of possible topics, then you took them through Ebay and Amazon to check out the activity and get a list of categories and sub-categories. You took those refined results to Clickbank and a few other online marketplaces to check for competing products. This also gave you a list of products and services that have affiliate programs, so you can earn money by referring people to them down the road.

- watch the video for this step - Having trouble watching this video? Click here for help installing the proper plug-ins.

So far so good... now it's time to use a keyword analysis tool on the keywords that have survived so far, to check out how many people are searching for related information.

For this step I want you to head over to WordTracker and use their free keyword tracking tool:

CLICK ON THIS LINK TO VISIT WORDTRACKER

Enter in one of your keywords and click "Hit me"... and WordTracker should spit out several keyword combinations, along with a rough idea of the number of people who have searched for that term today. One of my Keyword Combinations was "Turquoise Jewelry" (I started with Jewelry in the first step, and drilled down) and you can see my results for the keyword "Turquoise Jewelry" below (Image # 10)

Image #10 - WordTracker's FREE Keyword Tracking Tool. Roughly 180 people
have searched for "Turquoise Jewelry" today.

Take these keywords to the next step, and let's see who else is competing for these keywords...

Okay, so we know about how many people per day are searching for it... let's see who is competing for these people. Go to Google (www.google.com) and type in your keywords. I typed "Turquoise Jewelry" in and searched for it... and you can see from my results below that there are a bunch of people competing for these keywords: Google has found over a million competing pages (Image # 11).

Image #11 - Google's results for "Turquoise Jewelry"... over a million pages!

Okay... this is bad news: you don't want to compete with a million other pages. There is some good news though: There are some sponsored ads, which tells me that there must be profit in this niche, since others are paying to advertise.

Go Back and Forth.

Take your keywords, and your search results from KeyWord Tracker,
and go back and forth between KeyWord Tracker and Google.

You are basically looking for a combination of keywords that have as many search requests as possible within KeyWord Tracker, and as few people as possible competing inside your Google results. You will have to go back and forth a few times to refine these keywords to find the "sweet spot".

Here is an example: when I searched KeyWord Tracker for "Turquoise Jewelry" the first result didn't quite work (Google proved that), but the second result was good too: "Native American Turquoise Jewelry" had roughly 50 searches per day.

When I take these keywords back to Google and search for them the results are much more favorable:

Image #12 - Much better: 50+ searches per day and only
300,000 competing pages!

Which would you rather compete against for visitors? 1,000,000 Websites or 300,000 Websites?

The choice is yours... but I think it's pretty clear to me.

By playing with these steps you will get more familiar with them... and pretty soon you should be able to crank out valuable market research fairly easily.

Once I am done, I like to take the keywords that have made it through this process and search for them in Google again, and then I will click on some of the results and check out forums, websites, and blogs related to my new topic.

I’ll spend a fair bit of time going through these websites looking for further information that’ll help me determine the content of my product. I take notes, writing down the questions and responses and other related topics (as these can influence the chapters to cover in your book).

Through using these methods it should be pretty easy to come up with a great website Domain Name... and also a Title and a Chapter list for a new digital product!