How I find profitable niches and make money
Jun 29, 2010 General Stuff, PPC, SEO, Theme Design
I know that this blog has been a bit bollocks so far, but please remember I am still a newbie and it’s all one big learning curve for me.
In the last year I have gone from being totally broke to working full time from home in my own web based business. I’m still a long way from being a millionaire but at least I’m my own boss and I get to do what I please. I know that many of you out there also aspire to be full time web geeks like me so I will offer you tips and little secrets that have helped me to get this far.
Maybe some of the techniques I use are a little unorthodox or sometimes quite old school, but I’m just going to talk about what works for me. Some of you more experienced web marketers may be able to offer me help and advise which I will share with everyone.
Were all in this together folks, we gotta do the best we can with the short time we have. Work hard, earn some dough and enjoy our lives.
What I’m going to do now is tell you how I find new niches to promote affiliate products. I work mainly in fashion but the technique could be used for any sector.
Spyfu
An old tool but a goodie is spyfu.com. For those of you who haven’t used it before it’s a website that allows you to spy on the “big boys” PPC campaigns and see what keywords are performing best for them.
In my sector the major retailers have their fingers on the pulse re – latest trends and fads so by seeing what keywords they are bidding on I can sometimes manage to register a nice keyword rich domain and start some organic seo before the trend really kicks in.
Using this method I have just registered a cool two word .co.uk domain that matches exactly the name of a product that is tipped to be massive this autumn/winter. The name is not a copyright name and to be honest I couldn’t believe that it was available. I’m going to throw up a nice looking site on the domain and start some link building to hopefully make a few quid before Christmas.
I still did the usual research in the Google keyword tool and Google trends to find a nice steady increase in search month on month. I also like to check on Google blogs and twitter to see if the product is getting talked about much.
The next step is to see how difficult it would be to rank well for the term. So I stick my keywords in Google and find that I will only have to compete with a few shitty subdomains and a newspaper article. I’m confident that I will achieve a top 3 spot in time for the gold rush!
Yahoo Answers
As many of you are probably already aware, a lot of traffic can be got from answering questions. I have a site dedicated to electronic music equipment and most of the search engine traffic is from people typing questions into the search engines. If I can’t think what articles to write I will head over to Yahoo Answers chuck some of my keywords into the search box and see what questions people are asking. I’ll then go and write a post answering it. This is not really to get traffic from yahoo Answers itself (although I will still use it) but to get visitors from people typing the same question into search engines.
On one site last year I earned over £1300.00 in one week with a post entitled “Should I Fix my Gas and Electricity prices?”!
Stumbleupon Buzz
If I’m ever looking for some inspiration I will head over to StumbleUpon Buzz to see whats getting lots of hits in my niche. To do this, simply change the word “all” to “[MY NICHE]” in the URL. You should see some sites that are getting lots of views so you can be fairly confident that people are interested in that specific subject.
Ebay Pulse
Another old school tip, but I have come up with some really good ideas from spending 10 – 20 minutes on here. the trick is to drill right down into the relevant category to see what are the most watched items. By doing this you will start to see patterns emerge. The problem is – I come up with so many ideas, I don’t have time to work on them all. Maybe I should start an exclusive news letter about my ideas? That’s an idea!
Trend Blogs
I’m a big fan of some of the trend blogs out there. My favorites are Trend Hunter, Springwise and Trend Watching. I have all three in my RSS reader as they can be great for inspiration. Yes a lot of the items are not specifically related to the Internet, but I still think they can help you to “think outside the box”.
So there you have it. There is my little list of ways I look for niches. It has served me well so far and I am confident that it will continue to do so.
I’d be really interested to hear from you lot! have you got any cool niche research tips that you would like to share?
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