The following niche research confirms that the camper niche is currently an open opportunity, waiting to be served by any number of methods, set up an ebay store, sell a sourcing guide…

Niche Market Research

OCI (Online Commercial Intent %)
Searches (No. of Daily Searches (Google))
SEO Comp (No. of SEO Competing Sites)
Adwords CPC (Approximate Adwords Cost per Click)

These results have been trimmed to filter out results that have less than 150 searches per day and have less than 30,000 optimized competing pages.  For the complete list of results check out the niche research page for vw camper vans.

It’s finally arrived, your making money online veins have just been given a huge bypass, with the arrival of YouTube Sponsored Search!

There have been rumours about this service for some time and Google have obviously been planning an income stream from their video search engine superstar.  Michelle McPherson has posted an early heads up on her Social Marketing blog today.

In Michelles blog she details the whole ‘how to ‘ on using the service including the integration with Googles Billing facility.  So what does this really mean??

YouTube is known to be the internets No.2 Search Engine and the 3rd most visited site in the world today  (Quoted from Social Marketing) so the reach of this marketing behemoth is almost unbeatable, currently receiving in the region of 32,000,000 visitors each month with an Alexa Rank of 4.  The ability to reach the audience on a targeted level similar to adwords marketing but using video within a single site structure provides a totally integrated marketing forum.

Early days yet, who knows how this is likely to deliver, are the YouTube crowd in a buying mode or an entertainment mode?  Are they so used to receiving unlimited FREE video resources that they are not in the buying mindset whilst inside the YouTube framework??  Only time will tell!

In our chosen niche we have established a website which caters to a good portion of commercial terms and is ppopulated with an ebay store targeted at high ticket items we can now take a little time out to refine our research into our keywords using a great new tool from Google called Google Insights.

Google Insights delivers a much broader variety of tools which allow us to review the search data for given keywords within our niche over a much shorter and more recent time period. The tool also allows us to drill down to Country and region level and also makes suggestions about growing trends with related Keywords and Keyphrases.

It is important to note that the figures that are represented on the graphs and charts are ‘relative’ statistics, detailing searches and volumes on a scale of 1 – 100. So you can see that the Camper VW search terms is represented by a relative value of 69. This means that currently the search term is at 69% of its highest search volume trend over the lifetime of the data captured.

The graph also details the regional and country specific search data which provides us with invaluable promotional information. Whilst overall the Camper VW searches are at 69% overall, when you look below the graph, Google presents you with related search terms that are growing in the niche (see below)

The above graph shows us that over recent weeks and months the term “vw camper ebay” has delivered a rise of 220%, clicking upon this term will show us that 100% of this rise in search has come from the UK market in early 2008 and it has started to rise once again.

Further keyword research on this term will now be undertaken to determine if it should be pursued! What we know is that this niche is growing in the UK market and continues to do so, also ebay is a focussed point of reference for prospects.

So…we’ve found a reasonable niche which seems to tick the boxes when it comes to traffic, competition and OCI stakes (check ou the previous posts on finding a niche).  Now we need to setup camp in the niche and establish our authority to serve the prospecting visitors, the most effective way of achieving this in the long term, is to set up a blog which carries our sales offer, affiliate link or product.

Once we have our keywords and keyphrases we need to research the products that are currently being served to the market, in our niche we can see that our main keyword ‘camper vw’ is served by the following results in Google.

1. http://www.vwcampercrazy.co.uk/

This site serves visitors (which total 72,000 per month) with links to vehicles being sold or hired in the UK marketplace.

The site also serves visitors with banner ads for VW Camper related products and services.

2. http://www.volkswagencamper.co.uk/

With a PR of 4 this site is an online magazine which hosts a number of paid banner ads, the site is clearly an authority in this niche and sells advertising to related markets.  Additional areas of monetization come from merchandise and magazine subscriptions.

3. http://www.vwcampers.com/

This is a fan based website which holds a great deal of information on the camper niche, offering the site visitor with information on camper tours and meetings.  The site is monetized by various paid banners and affiliate links for magazines and camper insurance specialists.  In addition the site provides a search for campers for sale.

4. http://www.volksworld.com/

This is another subscription based site which offers similar information and monetization strategies to the above sites, banners, affiliate insurance and ebay stores.

5. http://www.vwcampercurtains.co.uk/

A whole site dedicated to camper curtains, not specifically vw camper vans but the site has been slightly optimized for our keyword.  This site sells camper curtains and tracks and could be monetized better for a PR4 position 5 ranking site…clearly a missed opportunity.

So these are our top 5 results for our search term, the remaining 5 sites are similar to sites 1-4 above and offer a similar form of monetization. What is clear is that there is a very strong following in this market and the Trends data tells us that the market is growing.  Our next step is to find high ticket items in the marketplace to earn commissions upon.

The highest ticket product in this niche seems to be the camper van itself, which ranges between £2000 and £24,500 in the UK ebay marketplace, with a whole variety of opportunities for spare parts, maintenance manuals, accessories etc to add to our portfolio.

Without much further though I would add an additional page to my blog which is already generating content using Wordpress Direct, the additional page would be an ebay store which I would create to display high ticket items which I could easily earn between £60 and £735 for referrals, dependant upon ebays terms and conditions and cookie life span.

So every time a visitor comes to my site and clicks on a link through to ebay, a cookie is dropped by ebay into the visitors pc which tells them that I have referred them to the site.  If the visitor makes a purchase on ebay for any item within a 2 week period then I am creditted for the commission on the sale!  Even if they enter through my VW Camper related site and end up buying a camera!

Take a look at my ebay page on camper vw to see how I have created the page.

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.