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.

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!

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.