Niche Website Research- An Introduction

Before proceeding with your niche idea you need to do some basic research to find out whether or not it is a viable idea. Viable in this context means - Do you have a reasonable chance of making money/ attracting sufficient visitors. You need answers to two very basic questions:

• How much demand exists for our niche?
• Is our chosen niche already highly competitive?

The basic strategy is the one you see in all marketing text books is to first find a market and then find products for that market. However in our case the market is going to be a niche market.Therefore the first part of the research is based around finding suitable high demand market niches and the second is to analyse those niches to determine how competitive they already are, with the idea being to find a high demand market with little competition.

Supply and Demand Research

There are many tools available for doing this research the one I use is the brainstorming tool (part of Site Build-it package). Here we will do it manually using free tools and resources on the Internet.

Even if you have already purchased Sitebuild-it it is still very useful to understand how to do it manually.

The main tool is Overture keyword suggestion tool which you can access directly or via other free keyword research tools like Good Keywords (recommended download).

To illustrate the process; imagine we are interested in food and want to make a Website based on Healthy food ( this is the theme) .

Go to the Overture Website and enter Healthy food. Overture returns with a list of related keywords along with the number of times they were searched for. (see below)

If we look at the above list we see that “healthy food” is in relatively high demand (29880). We need now to look at the supply. We now go to Google, Altavista or Yahoo it doesn’t matter which as long as you are consistent, and do a search on “healthy food”- with the quotes.

Here I’ve done a search with Google and it returned (755,000) websites.

The results are Overture 29880 and Google 755,000. Now straight away without looking any further you can see that you are going to be competing with lots of other websites.

For a niche this isn’t what we want. We need to narrow it down a little. Looking at the demand list we see that number 2 is healthy food recipes. If we do a Google search on this again using quotes we see that there are only 10,200.

This looks much better. Basically we have good demand (3100) and reasonable low supply (10,200). This means that we should have a reasonable chance of getting a good ranking in the search engines, and if we do we can expect a reasonable amount of traffic.

Now calculate the supply demand ratio by dividing the results and multiplying by 10 as follows:

supply/demand ratio=3100/10,200 *10 = 3

This ratio is useful for making a comparison between competing keywords. So lets repeat the process for the second keyword phrase on the supply list healthy fast food.

supply=22,300 and demand=2532

supply/demand ratio=2532/22,300 *10 = 1.10

comparing the two then healthy food recipes is the better option.

Its important not to get too obsessed with the numbers. They are used just for comparative reasons. The main rules are:

• Try to choose a niche area with little competition.
  and
• Make sure that there is sufficient demand for that niche

If you have several ideas then you need to go through this process for each of them. Once you have researched the viability of your possible themes it’s time to choose your niche.
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