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Day 3 - Doing Some Market Research
By Mike Mindel | August 6, 2007
Please review the ‘Market Research’ tab on the latest spreadsheet.
I created a new Market Research tab with the following columns on the left:
In the first column I’ve got NICHE MARKET. I think we’ve talked about this enough so I’m not going to talk about it anymore!
In the second column I’ve put SOLVE A PROBLEM. This is where I think about my niche market and see what problems I can help them solve.
In the third column I’ve put SUB NICHE. This should come out of thinking about solving the problem for the niche market.
As far as day 3 market research is concerned - niche rules!
Plug In Your Niche
So take my niche market ‘theme park junkies’. The problem I want to solve is ‘how can I help theme park junkies find the best rollercoaster parks around the world suited to their tastes?’. This leads me to come up with the sub-niche ‘international rollercoaster reviews’.
Niche Rules
I’ve come to a conclusion by the way.
Whilst niche markets are great for brainstorming and fantastic for churning out niches - it’s actually the sub-niches which you want to plug into Wordtracker.
The reason is pretty obvious really. No one who is a member of a niche market is searching for the niche market in the search engine.
The theme park junky is not going to type ‘theme park junkies’ into the search engine. Don’t believe me? Try it and see. You get no results.
So plug your sub-niche into the free keyword tool ok?
What Do I Type In?
Good question. Do you type in ‘buying unusual property’? Well. I did try that. This is what I got:
No results. Great.
Well here’s a little tip. Just type in the core keywords. Wordtracker uses an all words search. This means that it tries to look up ALL of your words.
If you type in ‘buying unusual property’ then Wordtracker tries to match all of the keywords with the word ‘buying’, ‘unusual’ and ‘property’ in them. Well there aren’t any!
So I changed tack and put in the core words that describe my sub niche which are ‘unusual property’.
Ah. Better. That’s more like it. People are actually typing in ‘unusual properties for sale’ and not ‘buying unusual property’. So why is that?
Well. Think like a member of the unusual property buyers market. I want to buy a houseboat. What am I going to type into Google.
Am I going to type ‘buying unusual property’.
Why?
Why would I type that?
I may well be buying unusual property. But I’m not going to type exactly that keyword into Google. I wouldn’t expect it to return any useful results.
Instead, I want to know what unusual properties there are for sale. You know. Ones that I can buy.
So I’m more likely to type ‘unusual properties for sale’.
It’s subtle isn’t it? 
So you see my keyword column. That’s where I think like my niche market. So think, what is the miminum number of words you can type into Google to get what you want?
That means ‘rollercoaster review’ and not ‘theme park junkies’. That means ‘juicing health’ not ‘healthy juicers’.
What If There Just Ain’t No Keywords?
That’s kind of annoying isn’t it? I plugged in ‘healthy sweets’ and it brought back nothing.
That’s really frustrating. What about ’sweet tooth health’ ? Nope.
So what am I going to do? Am I going back to my list with my tail between my legs? Hell no.
I’m going to cheat. Yes. Cheat.
Go General
I’m now going to hack off the words that make my niche a sub-niche and look at the niche as a whole. I’m going to plug in the word ‘healthy’ into the free keywords tool.
Now I’m going to scan down from the top until I hit something that is similar to my sub-niche. Healthy recipes… no… healthy eating…no… aah. healthy snacks. So I’ll click on healthy snacks:
and that can become my sub-niche.
I feel guilty for all of ten seconds. Now I’ll move on.
Psychological Thrillers
The same thing happened with write psychological thrillers. No results. I couldn’t believe it.
So I went general with ‘novel’:
Now there’s a list of novel types e.g. romance novels, erotic novels, graphic novels, mystery novels and below the fold I saw suspense novels.
Well ’suspense novels’ is close in tone to ‘psychological novels’. Lets try ‘psychological novel’:
One keyword. Well what does that tell me?
People are more interested in suspense novels than psychological novels.
Well. I’m just going to cheat and add suspense thriller writers in my spreadsheet.
These are pragmatic times! Notice I’ve put an asterix next to suspense novels to show that I cheated and found a different but related sub-niche.
A Note About Daily Search
So now I’ve got two more columns daily search & competition y/n:
As per Ed’s day 3 training I select the total number of searches at the bottom of the screen. So if I look up ’suspense novel’:
you can see that the total searches are 160. So don’t put 33 in your spreadsheet. Put in 160. I’ve seen some of you do that. You know who you are…
Competition Review For Psychological Novel
Off to Google to do a search for ‘psychological novel’:
I will not judge my niche… I will not judge my niche…
Ok. So as you can see there isn’t much paid competition happening. There also isn’t much organic selling happening. By paid I mean in the ads like this one:
This one’s about knowing your personality. No use to me. By organic I mean the non paid for search engine results. The ones above that start with ‘Psychological novel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopoedia’.
You know what. ‘Writing psychological novels’ is going to get a big fat no in my spreadsheet.
Competition Review For My Cheat Niche: Suspense Novel
This fairs a bit better:
There are some real people selling real suspense books. Mainly as part of a book club though. There’s an ad for some book called ‘The Deed’. Lets click on that:
Ahh. I like it. It’s got ‘Buy The Deed’ on the top left. I wonder how thats working out for him.
Lets look at the organic listings:
Apart from Amazon selling from a list of thrilling suspense novels theres nothing much going on here.
But I’m happy. ‘Suspense novels’ gets a y in the spreadsheet for competition.
To Pay Or Not To Pay
The issue of paid ads isn’t all that clear on the day 3 video. I’m fairly sure that Ed wants us to analyse paid ads in the niche we are thinking about entering. This shows that other people have been there before you and you’re not blazing a new trail.
Be concerned if you don’t see too many ads or too many generic ads. The ads should prove the market.
Notice This
I’ve done a lot of noticing. I’ve noticed that for some of my niches there just isn’t much traffic or competition. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel as this is a high risk strategy. So ‘creating’ a market is out. You want to locate a market that already exists and then give them what they want.
But don’t JUDGE your niche. Just notice that some niches just seem to work better with the criteria than others.
Finally
See the Market Research tab on my spreadsheet for the rest of my choices, daily searches & competition.
Summary
- Think as a member of your niche market. What is the minimum number of words I can type into Google to get what I want. Then plug these into the free keywords tool.
- Enter your sub-niche not your niche market. Theme park junkies don’t themselves type ‘theme park junkies’ into Google. They type in things like ‘rollercoaster reviews’ or ‘theme parks’. I.e. what are they searching for.
- If you find no results for your niche, cheat up to the general niche and then look down for a sub-niche which is close to the one you want. There’s a probably a market using different keywords.
- Ed didn’t make it too clear whether he wanted us to look in both paid & organic results for people who sell stuff. I gave most of the emphasis to paid ads but had a glance at the organic to see if any body was selling there too.
Technorati Tags: day three diary, think as member of niche, niche market, minimum nymber of words, free keywords tool, sub niche, plug in your niche, niche rules, go general, healthy snacks, psychological thriller, mystery thriller, suspense thriller, daily search, google competition, competition review, know your personality, i will not judge my niche, honest guv
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Topics: Diary |
August 6th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
Thanks for clearing things up, Mike. And thank you for the spreadsheet example as well!
August 7th, 2007 at 6:24 am
Mike, you have provided some great summaries and the examples are stupendous. Keep it coming!
August 7th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Mike - this is thoroughly excellent!
Ed was focusing on the paid ads to begin with - to see what traditional sales letters there are.
As generally it is highly unlikely to see a traditional sales letter at the top of organic search (though we’re trying to creep our way up - lol).
And there is absolutely no harm in looking at the organic side as well.
Ed will indeed be addressing the organic side as we move ahead.
I loved about the keywords - as that is where I am struggling at the moment with one particular niche idea. I am not sure what keywords to pick for it.
Caro
August 7th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Aaahh…yes! This is what I was talking about in my post over on the 30DC forum (www.thirtydaychallenge.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1509 ). So it IS a matter of semantics, as I suspected. And, also, all of my niche ideas come out of problems I want to solve and I couldn’t image I was the only person in the world wanting those particular solutions!
Thank you for articulating it like this for me!
Gretchen
August 7th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
Oh, and also…yesterday afternoon while I was trying to make a spreadsheet I intuitively started coming up with “tags” for my niches. Probably because of having to think in terms of tags so much for StumbleUpon and del.ic.ious. My whole world is becoming a tag! Anyway…maybe that is another way to get down to the essence of the niche market for keywords…pretend you’re stumbling your niche.
Gretchen
August 7th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Flip your point of view.
What is my niche market: suspense thriller writers.
What would I type if I was in my niche market: write a suspense novel.
September 3rd, 2007 at 6:54 pm
[…] Day 3 - Doing Some Market Research […]
November 16th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
[…] I took my seven niche ideas and entered them into the keyword tracker mentioned in the TDC day 3 video. I’m taking notes using the Google notepad and Google Docs. I had to massage my keywords a little bit to get some results for my niche. Take a look at Mike Mindel’s day 3 diary for some hints on how to work with the keyword tracker. […]