Niche Market and Keyword Research for Your Next Online Business
Before we get started with your next online business platform and more, you will need to firstly decide what you want to blog about, now it may be that you already know what it is that you want to write about. If not, then I would suggest that you get a blank piece of paper and think about what you want to blog about and write down your ideas. This is where it all starts from, if you get this wrong, you would end up frustrated. I know this because many bloggers consult me for advice. They come with the complain that they have started a blog but they are not getting anything after several months of dedication. We end up discovering that they just bumped into blogging without a plan behind it.
So before you start rushing to create that online business, you need to be well conversant about your niche market and keyword research. To get started, write around 5-10 different ideas, for example it could be:
Affiliate Marketing
Internet Marketing
Making Money Online
Weight Loss
Dating
Branding Yourself
Personal Development
Mobile Phone Apps
Blogging
Nigeria
Jobs
Please note, I will be publishing more niche ideas soon on Make Money Online Nigeria. You would need to subscribe so that you won’t get the ideas delivered to you as soon as I publish them here.
If you have written down your ideas, now you need to check and see which of your ideas are popular niches and actually receiving searches in the search engines. It is important to some niche and keyword research, this will help you narrow down your choice of topic/niche, the reason being that if your niche is not receiving any searches then the likelihood of people finding your blog or being interested in what you have to say will be almost zero. This is with an exception that you are ready to bring your blog from obscurity to limelight.
See below for some tools to help you decide on popular niches:
Google Zeitgeist – https://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist/index.html
Yahoo Buzz – https://buzz.yahoo.com/
Lycos – https://www.lycos.com/
EBay Pulse – https://pulse.ebay.com/
Great! You will have decided on your niche and now the second part of the research will be your Keywords. See below for tools you can use for keyword research.
Google Keyword External Tool – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Free Word Tracker – https://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
Free Keyword Discovery – https://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
Good Keywords (Software) – https://www.goodkeywords.com/products/gkw/
Let’s assume the niche that interests you is “Dating in Nigeria”, we will use the Google Keyword External Tool to check how many searches there are for this niche at the moment of writing this article. Type “Dating in Nigeria” into the Keyword box, Google will ask you enter the ‘catchpa’ characters in black font.
Click on ‘Get keyword ideas’. Google will then show results of active searches, for the keyword that you search for. If the result displays plenty of searches for ‘Dating in Nigeria’ so it would be safe to assume that this could be a profitable niche if it was something that interested you. It could be you may wish to narrow down your niche and keywords; you would want to find a ‘Keyword Phrase’ that is receiving lots of searches a month.
I have used Dating in Nigeria as an example in this brief overview, you would follow the same steps above for all the niche and keyword ideas you have written down. You will need to do a bit of research on all keywords. If you are still unsure of what keywords or niches to choose, I would suggest you spend some time researching on Google.com for a niche that has lots of searches and that you are interested in. I will continue to use ‘Dating in Nigeria’ to show how you can find out what keywords are being used for popular websites on Google Page 1. It is important when researching for your niche and keywords as I mentioned earlier that you ensure to include “” quotation marks, this will ensure that the results Google return will be of competing websites for the keyword, otherwise the results returned will be a broad match.
Go to Google.com and enter your “keyword or keyword phrase”, and then write down the web addresses that interest you. You will see the relevant keywords will be in bold font, I will explain more about this when we talk about Search Engine Optimization later in this series. However the research you do now will help you when it is time to get your new WordPress Blog listed in the major search engines.
Once you have done this, go back to the Google Keyword External Tool, select Website content, enter the website/blog address (URL) of one of the websites/blogs you found on Google.com and click “Get Keyword ideas”. Ideally when you are compiling your keywords list it is important to ensure that there are less than 100,000 competing sites for the keyword to ensure profitability, you will see this information in the right of the Google Results Page. In compiling your keyword list, make sure you have a list of around 30-40 keywords.
Originally posted 2011-08-02 10:00:43.
