Introduction Niches, also known as keywords, are a much focused market compared to the main market.
Niches are formed due to the fact that the main market cannot fulfill the needs of this subset of market.
For example, the main market of weight loss cannot fulfill the needs of the subset market, weight loss tips.
The main market consists of many niches and therefore a particular niche might not be able to find the solution they need.
In Researching Niches, the main technique to use is to break the main keyword into smaller and more focused keywords.
Free tools to help you research niches are widely available online.
And today I am going to use Overture, Google Trends, and WordTracker.
Finding the main keyword to start with Before you start, you should ask yourself which topics that interest you a lot? Is it soccer? Will it be gaming? If that is a topic that you cannot even stop talking about it, you have found a good niche for yourself.
Remember, it might be a good niche for you, but it may not be a good niche to target.
Your job here is to list all topics that you want to talk about.
Now, have it recorded somewhere, preferably on MS Excel.
For each topic, use a new worksheet.
However, if you do not have MS office installed, do not worry.
You can use tools like NotePad, or WordPad.
But you need to create different files for different topics.
Example: If you are using MS Excel, you might save your Excel file as "Niches.
xls" and have "Soccer" and "Gaming" worksheets in it.
If you are using Notepad, then you will have 2 different files, "Soccer.
txt" and "Gaming.
txt".
In your hands now you have different markets to research.
Now, allow me to introduce the different tools that can help your research.
Overture Overture is a tool by Yahoo! that helps you to generate keywords.
The best part that I like about Overture is that it will help you generate different related keywords.
For example, if you key in "Weight loss", it will return you other related keywords like "Weight loss program" and "Weight loss tips" along with the number of search for each keyword.
The order of the keywords is arranged by the number of search.
However, I would like to raise a red flag here.
The results of Overture can be quite backdated to Jan 2007.
So, please do not be alarm that the statistics differ.
WordTracker WordTracker is a paid service however there are companies that provide free service of WordTracker to promote their business.
I have recently found a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) company that provides this free service.
The good thing about WordTracker is that it will provide you with that day's search statistic.
Meaning, the results that it returns you, is the past 24 hours search statistic.
Furthermore, it will also return you the related keywords like Overture.
Google Trends Google Trends is one of many free tools that Google provides to many webmasters.
It will show the trend of the keyword and how much search do they have in Google.
However, in Google Trends, you can only see the graph of the search.
Meaning, you can see whether there is a rise or a drop of the keyword search.
With this tool, you can predict whether there is an increase demand or a decrease demand of your keyword.
With the above 3 free tools, you can generate a whole list of niches/keywords.
This should take you up to 2-4 hours.