Niche research with Gtrends
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.
April 6th, 2009 at 6:48 am
great info again. I was wondering what the name of the ebay widget is. Can you help us?
April 6th, 2009 at 7:53 am
Thanks for the shopping.com research idea. I will be using this in the near future for sure. BTW…what type of adsense income would you expect once you get to the top 3?
April 6th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
peter,
It is a custom banner (Beta) from EPN. You should find it in tools.
Michael,
The target is just $1-2/day. Once you have one autoblog/site/web 2.0 property making you $1/day you go and repeat the process. However with this particular niche I should be able to generate around $5-10/day.
April 8th, 2009 at 11:29 am
Thanks for your great article.
This software is unknown in france.
I test that thank u.
April 8th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Ilia, thanks for answering our questions. However I have a few more
1. Are you going to add more articles to the blog or will concentrate your efforts on building links to it?
2. I saw that most of the inbound links are from blogs that have nothing to do with the topic of your blog. Do you think that the nature of the links matters? Since the competition is so weak do you think that you will be able to prevail even with links that have nothing to do with your blog’s topic?
Thanks again
April 8th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
You are welcome Peter!
1) I usually face two options. Either go for an autoblog or leave things as they are. With static blogs I would only add more content if I can think of other products that would complement the original product. Just to give you an example, adding a new article to promote replacement bulbs or adapters. If I was to frequently add new articles it would be time consuming. Then you may as well turn it into a proper blog.
By the way. There aren’t that many problems with static content. The only major difference will probably be spidering frequency but the pages themselves should rank just as well.
2) I only really wanted to get a few backlibnks in order to get things nicely indexed. Like I said, this is just an example blog and I did not really put much effort into it.
On a side note there have been indications that Google no longer gives as much juice for having related backlinks from related websites as it used to. In other words the difference between a related and none related backlinks is getting thinner. Don’t take my word for it but this is what myself and other SEOs have been noticing recently. Recently there was an article about this published by one of the SEO gurus. I’ll try and find it.
April 9th, 2009 at 7:04 am
I am curious as to what the reasoning is. Would love to read that article.
Thanks Ilia
April 9th, 2009 at 8:54 am
great post ilia as always, the idea of niche blogging interests me also. may i ask how many articles on average you would put on each of your niche blogs/sites? i have recently bought market samurai for KW research and everything is starting to make sense. Can i just ask you this:
when your creating a new niche blog that you wish to rank for in the search engines, what is the max PR of the competitors you would compete against, i mean say for example your niche blog will be brand new, and the current top 10 have a PR of between 2 and 3, and they are fairly well aged domains, would a new blog be able to break into the top 10 due to the above having old domains and PR? what parameters would you use when calculating your SEO competiton i guess is what im trying to say….lol
hope that makes sense
alan
April 9th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
It all depends on your setup. I usually have my autoblogs post 1 article per day. With static blogs I would add as many articles as I think is necessary. It is usually around 10. With quality, manual blogging I aim for 2 or 3 quality posts per week. Even though I have not had time to blog properly for a while now.
PR is something I never pay attention to. Its like this blog for example. I was slapped by Google for doing one of my crazy experiments and my PR has been gone for almost a year now. However I still rank higher than some PR7 websites. In fact if it was not for my downtime and loss of backlinks I would still be ranking 16th for “seo”. This is out of 263,000,000 competitors. I should be 50th at the moment. Download seoQuake plugin for FireFox and make a few searches for some random keywords. You will see that top results won’t always have the highest PR.
April 9th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Very interesting idea.
Unfortunately I am unable to get EPN approval as they seem to have locked down the approval process.
I will give it a try to see whether I can build some niche blogs of my likings.
Thanks for sharing
April 12th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
I think it’s awesome your only 22 and know what you know and do what you do. Good for you! Thanks for all your info. You got it going on man!!
April 14th, 2009 at 12:17 am
That’s a nice tutorial.. I always wonder how we can actually do a keyword research for new domain.. I like the concept… because before this I was stick with 3 dedicated domain and never considered affiliate marketing..
Nice blog dude.!
April 14th, 2009 at 1:05 am
Your reflection on PR and rankings is borne out by personal experience too, Ilia. As far as this example of tours is concerned, I am interested to see what the end results are going to look like, and would love to have a look at your entire portfolio. All the small dollar amounts add up, but managing everything….how do you do it?
April 14th, 2009 at 8:34 am
wow, very nice tip you got here, will try this one
thanks for the very informative tip sir 
April 16th, 2009 at 11:17 am
This is a very good tip. Coming from an expert, I’ll try this.
April 17th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Marketing Man,
I would usually move on as soon as I am happy with the revenue and only come back when the mini site requires some maintenance. It is not hard to manage.
Talking about portfolio. I’ve learned to never share any of my money makers with anyone else. At the end of the day you will only create more competition or make somebody jealous which is even worse.
April 20th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
My man, if you’re so successful at driving search engine traffic to your site, then why is your page rank 0? That just does not add up.
Methinks you’re telling some tall tales here about success to fool the people.
Page rank Zero means you are not an expert!
April 20th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
1) I am not here to sell you anything nor make money from this blog. Why would I want to pretend to be somebody I am not?
2) PR means absolutely nothing. Obviously you think I’m a fraud so search for “Page rank means nothing” and see what others have to say.
3) Have a look at my Alexa rank. I generate 1000s of daily uniques.
4) I consistently rank in top 100 for keyword “seo” 2 years running with competition of 256,000,000
5) I am not telling people about my success, I am here to help people out and share my experience.
6) You don’t know me, you never worked with me, you obviously never heard about me before yet you come here and instead of being grateful you make accusations. I say you are a jealous person who thinks that PR (An out of date, inaccurate indicator) determines the level of one’s success. If you don’t like what I have to say, save yourself some time and don’t come here again.
April 23rd, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Ilia
I am totally agree with your comment “Page rank means nothing” . I regularly visits a forum with zero page rank but has Alexa rating above 9k.
April 23rd, 2009 at 8:01 pm
Thanks for sharing this extra tool for keyword research. Due to highly competition in certain keyword, my keyword research take a long trip to settle down.
April 28th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
thx for your info
very help me to understand about SEO
June 7th, 2009 at 9:48 am
Ilia, your points are well taken. Sharing isn’t caring (at least not for your own best interest), but the techniques you’re sharing are already enough to really get them juices flowing.
July 5th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
[...] the updates… Remember the 35mm slide scanner blog from my previous niche research post? You should now be able to find it on the front page of Google for related keywords, [...]
July 8th, 2009 at 8:18 am
Your topic was great! Thanks for taking a moment to draft such an interesting piece…
Kathy
June 20th, 2010 at 4:05 am
I would usually move on as soon as I am happy with the revenue and only come back when the mini site requires some maintenance. It is not hard to manage.
June 26th, 2010 at 5:40 am
Thanks for the shopping.com research idea.
June 26th, 2010 at 5:41 am
I will try this one
thanks for the very informative tip sir
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