By popular request I am going to explain one of the ways to find and research your new niche from scratch. I was planning to make this post a while ago and by the time I actually got to researching it this morning I noticed that one of the tools I will be using went from Free to $27 which is a shame.

I am going to be looking for some easy to invade niches with little competition but good search engine traffic. Let head on to Shopping.com. If you have a look at the bottom of the page they have a link called top searches. This is where I look for popular products. Have a look at some of the categories. Each will contain thousands of products. Keep a close eye on long tail products with serial number and brand names. People who search for a particular product are interested in that product and are much more likely to buy. After checking out a few different niches I clicked on Scanners and straight away noticed “35mm slide scanners”. This keyphrase looks quite specific and longtail.

Google competition (with quotes) showed only 6000 competitors. I have also immediately noticed the number of sponsored ads. The more ads you see the more money you can expect to get for each sale or click you generate.

Lets head to Wordtracker and see how many searches we can expect to get. Here is where the fun bit starts. Make sure you have a Gtrends FireFox plugin installed which will allow you to easily grab all the keyword suggestions from Wordtracker. Launch your Gtrends software and in your FireFox click on tools/Grab WordTracker keywords. Your Gtrends software should start doing all the number crunching for you.

Give it a few minutes and Gtrends will show you competition and the estimated number of searches for each keyword as well as any web 2.0 properties that have been spotted on the front page for a particular keyword. Ignore the verdict column as it is mainly used for larger projects. I checked both “35mm scanner”, “slide scanner” and “35mm slide scanner” phrases and estimated around 200-300 daily searches. This is great traffic for a little project like this one.

After I was happy with the new niche I quickly created 35mm slide scanner blog. A few days later it has generated me $2 or so with Adsense and should rank around 25th for keyword “35mm slide scanner”. Hopefully with a bit of backlink development I should hit the top 3 by the end of the month. Please note that this is just a live example I could afford to make public. There are much better niches out there that I am not going to reveal.

One problem marketeers face every day I can only describe as user evolution. People learn quickly and consequently stop falling for the common marketing tricks webmasters have in place for them. Take popups for example. Believe it or not back in the days they were used not only to annoy the crap out of your visitors but also to make money. How many of you even look at the popups these day when you are unfortunate enough to come across one? A quick hand reflex sends the mouse pointer flying to the little red x before you even get the chance to move your eyes.

Let me tell you a little story about a classic marketing technique. Lets say you have a mailing list of people interested in some rather interesting new software you have developed. You shoot them an email on the day you launch offering this marvelous piece of software for $100. Some of them will buy it but what about those who don’t? You wait for a week and ask them again but this time lower the price to lets say $50. This method is very effective… in the short run. In the long run however people will realize what you are doing and in their turn refrain from buying your product until you send them a second chance offer with 50% discount.

So when are you more likely to bump into a not so evolved user? Offline! You will be surprised how many old online marketing tricks will work a treat offline. Internet is flooded with free this and free that offers. In real world on the other hand things are much less saturated. Lets generate some leads! First of all we need to find a suitable CPA offer. I logged into affiliate.com and found a £150 free Tesco gift card offer which pays $1.15 per email submit (Because I am in UK). I then bought an easy to remember domain name similar to freetescovoucher.com and redirected it to my affiliate link. Finally I went and through some local magazines and newspapers and contacted them asking for a quote. A few days later my ad was up. It was a small square similar to this one

that people could cut out. (Please note that I am using an example from the top of my head which was similar to my campaign. I really don’t want hundreds of  people going out there and doing exactly the same thing. Think everything through before you do something similar. Make sure you can legally print tokens containing brand names or logos. Also, the last thing you want is people cutting out your tokens and going to the actual company, asking to redeem them.) My ad was running for a week. The conversion rate has been phenominal! I can’t post the exact figures but I can say that this campaign worked out at around 5 to 1 ROI. Are there any more tricks you can use? There certainly are!

Did you know that according to the study carried out a few years ago an average unhappy customer would tell 10 of their friends about their negative experience. These friends will in their turn tell around 5 more people. If you leave enough of your customers angry with your product/service you will pretty much start a negative viral boom. This can often considerably damage your business to the point of you going bankrupt. Nobody would want this to happen to them. Or would they?

When it comes to backlinks there is no such thing as a negative backlink. If I point to Live search with Live search sucks I will only be giving it a boost in terms of seo. This is in fact very similar to what has happened to me. Do you remember my post on generating money with Freecycle? Have a look at some of the comments. When writing that blog post I had no idea what a can of warms I was opening. I ended up causing an absolute outrage within Freecycle community. They were so disgusted with my blog that they would go around telling everyone about my shameless money generating method. At one point I had so much traffic coming in I thought about turning the WordPress supercache on. Best of all however, every time they were mentioning my “terrible” blog on various forums, blogs and social networks… you guessed it! I was getting a backlink.

PS: I’m sorry Freecycle but I promised myself there will be no subject no matter how controversial, that I would not cover on my blog.

A standard niche marketing routine would involve finding an interesting product or a niche you can promote or get into, followed by further market research, website/landing page construction and promotion. On of such promotion methods is article submission. I personally think that there are other seo methods that can work much better, therefore whenever I see somebody concentrating on article submissions I assume that I can almost certainly overtake them at SERPs. Obviously this depends on outsourcing and other factors. This is what makes backward niche marketing work.

Because articles tend to be the final stage for many marketeers I can backtrack their niche, keywords, products as well as the landing page. Lets head on to Ezine articles. Our mission is to find recent articles that look like they have been stuffed with keywords or were written by amateur authors in order for them to promote their niche landing page. Preferably something related to an actual product you could sell.

Here is an interesting article I have just found on the front page of EA.

Looks like they guy who wrote this article is selling some sort of Ebook.

Lets go to the articles and see what keywords he is targeting. If you run firefox hit Ctrl+U to view the source code. Can you see meta name="keywords" content="how to get your ex back"> at the top of the page? Looks like he is targeting a particular long tail keyword/phrase. Google keyword tools tell me that this is actually quite a competitive niche to get into. However if you scroll down a little bit you will be able to see some more related keyphrases people search for. For example “getting ex back”. 8100 searches per month and relatively little competition.

But what does he actually sell? Let’s go to his page by clicking on the link at the bottom of the article. As you can see it is a free blogspot blog acting as a landing page. Hover your mouse over the link he posts in his blog post. That’s right! Its a clickbank product. In fact he earns $24.09 from every sale. If we were to get into his niche and target smaller “getting ex back” keyword then we would realistically be able to generate around 10.000 monthly uniques considering other search engines and keyphrases. Now lets say we set up a professional landing page and convert every 50 visitors… 10.000 / 50 = 200 x $24.09 = $4980/month. This is being realistic and not pulling number out of my ass like “make $10.000 a day” people do.

Tips: Find low competition niches if your not too comfortable with seo, take your time with research and don’t expect results the same day.

PS: I did not want to write an essay so I understand if some aspects of this method remain unclear. Drop me a comment and I will be more than happy to fill in the blanks. Good luck!