Archive for October, 2008

Lets examine the anatomy of a great niche, one that is worth pursuing in internet marketing terms.  These are the qualifiers which we use daily to find a niche that is worth monetizing.

With a list of keywords and keyphrases in our niche we need to decide which ‘Umbrella’ term we would like to consider pursuing, this is usually decided by the size of the umbrella monthly search volume and how unusual it appears, followed by how well served the niche is and if the niche is commercially viable.

1. Daily Search Volume
   Our keywords or keyphrases should return over 200 daily searches.  In the main, and after extensive research using adwords and natural search it appears that for every 200 visitors you will achieve a single sale, it’s about numbers and averages.  Many of my sites return exactly these stats so I am comfortable with this metric.  There are other considerations here, such as the product quality, the price point and the commercial intent of the niche.  In the main my price point hovvers between $9.95 and $49.95 in non internet marketing niches, and on average I achieve a single sale for every 200 visitors.
2. Optimized Competing Pages.
   The ideal metric for ‘optimized competition’ for the keyword or keyphrase should fall below 30,000 resulting pages.  So, using the Google exact match query “HOT NICHE“, the resulting pages are those which have the exact phrase of words in the exact same order.  We can further investigate the results by interrogating the IN TITLE query, which tells us if the resulting pages contain the keyword or keyphrase in the Title tag of the page, this again is only an indication that the page has been effectively optimized.
3. Online Commercial Intent
   As discussed in our last post, OCI or (online commercial intent) determines to what level our prospects are likely to make a purchase using the keyphrase that we are focussing upon.  Measured as a percentage, anything above 55% (0.55 in adlabs index) is worthy of consideration.  It must be emphasized at this point that OCI is not a definitive science, it is purely a guide for marketers.  There is a certain amount of intelligence built into the OCI metrics, play around with this and you will quickly notice that Adlabs have considered a wide range of parameters to return the percentage of intent.

Taking our VW Camper Van niche into account, we have streamlined our list of keywords to short and longtail phrases which fit the above criteria, 1) Over 200 daily searches 2) Under 30,000 competition 3) Over 55% OCI in a niche that is faairly unusual with an umbrella search volume of almost 15,000 daily searches.

Our target is to attract searches and prospects who type in the umbrella phrase but our strategy is to first of all optimize for the short and long tail strings that are derived from this umbrella.  In this way we quickly build up a search volume and analytics data set that we can interrogate for a few weeks and hopefully attract some sales from.

Check out the next post on how to monetize our niche.

Taking all things into consideration, as internet marketers we spend a great deal of our time searching for red hot niches that nobody has discovered…why?  There are so many opportunities out there in markets that have been discovered by only a few and there are people making a killing in these micro niches.

For example, taking my previous post into consideration, the VW Camper market is extremely strong around Europe at the moment, this vehicle is going through a kind of revival and is a cool wagon for travelling to and from gigs and parties in, the Myspace and Facebook crowds are mad for this…so why not create a project that serves this niche with a certain amount of quality and at the same time serves you with a modest amount of income?

How?  Well, take the keyword research that I presented in the previous post, when I ran this research I was presented with a list of over 1500 long tail key phrases which tells me that the market is active to a failry deep level, offering many opportunities for monetizing.

Once I have this list I then proceed to filter out some of the crap using a tried and tested set of thresholds, these are “more than 200 daily searches” and “less than 30,000 optimized competing pages”.  These filters present me with a great list of results which are all healthy in the OCI stakes according to microsofts OCI tool.

Once I have decided which of the keywords are likely to deliver the best sales (top OCI, top searches, lowest competition) then I start to look at what there is in the market that I can use to monetize the searches.  The most obvious to me is Ebay, Amazon and Adsense.

With this in mind I find a suitable wordpress theme, tweak it to suit by adding a VW Image and voila my theme is ready to go.  By trawling the internet for content in the shpe of videos, articles and Q&A I create and scrape content to populate my site with keyword rich references.

Taking time to create post categories which include my keywords, I then start to post relevant content.  The best resource for this has to be wordpress direct, providing frsh content that is automatically posted to your blog that is relevant and keyword rich…without you having to lift a finger!  I can set WordPress Direct up to blog from various different sources using my pre-set keywords to create a relevant post.

Once I have set up the VW camper blog, I create additional pages which are also keyword rich which feature ebay stores for VW Camper Sales and VW Camper Spare Parts…take a minute to view the pages.  These are simply set up through my abay partner membership.

The rest is automatic…let’s wait to see the results in a few weeks time, I’ll post the juicy bits here so sign up for the updates.  All I need to do now is set up some backlinks, do some social posting and rinse and repeat!