Market samurai or Micro Niche finder?

Micro Niche Finder is awesome, it doesn't supply the all the data Market Samurai does, but it's also about $50 less.

I've also never had any problems with the operation of MNF. I've owned MS for probably over a week now and haven't been able to use it yet because it won't generate any keywords (for me). It's because of my slow I/net connection, but MNF handles it fine.

Support says that hopefully an update coming soon will fix it. Of course it's still technically in beta also, and they're constantly working to get it right.

I'm holding on for a little while before getting my money back on MS because it does look very promising. I think it will definitely be the one to beat when everything is right.

Jeff

Hey Steven,

Have you been keeping your MNF up to date ? It's updated regularly, and it's now ay version 4.1.0. You know there's an 'Update Link' on the MNF front page, right ?

I've never had a single problem with it.

Also, I was told (after I purchased) that the reason my copy of MS wasn't working was because of my slow I/net connection. I should say also, I was offered my money back immediately.

I told them I would like to hold out for the next upgrade, I was told it may correct the many problems that they've had with the connection issues. Hopefully it will fix it, it looks to be a great piece of software.

Jeff

My main problems with MNF is the search counts sometimes do not work. It display "Dig This", which means nothing to me. The background downloading service does not seem to work properly because it never seems to finish searching.

I wish MS and MNF both display the KEI and number of google ads.

I use both ,they complement each other.
check this video to get an idea.

micro niche finder software: Find top adsense keywords

I have the full version of MNF and I am thinking of getting a refund soon. Why? Cos it cannot even get the search counts of the keywords I input from a text file! Can you imagine that? It drives me nuts and I have been complaining to the author and his support team told me it would be released in the next major update in 3-4 months time!

MNF uses the exact match to get the keyword stats from Google but I prefer to use the phrase match. Can't change that. The background service seems to do nothing. The update link in the software seem useless and you gotta go to another web site to check if there is a new version or not. I have no idea how it got its Google CPC prices. I would prefer if they displayed all 3 google CPC prices - broad, phrase and exact.

As for Market Sumurai, it has lot of new terms that the team behind MS invented. Ratio of this against that, which I do not believe in. I don't understand or agree with the way they calculated the visitor value and market potential of a keyword.

If you're doing PPC marketing, I think it is important to know the price of the bids and also the number of advertisers. Both MS and MNF do not show you the number of advertisers. MS displays this competition % which means nothing to me. What does 100% competition mean to a PPC advertiser? How many advertisers does 100% have?

MS tries to be really fancy with all these new formulas and jargons but I think they are rubbish. Search results = SEOC. Market value = estimated daily number of clicks x the average cpc price. I think that is not a good way to calculate a keyword or market's potential.

Maybe it is just me. I just want the following data from a keyword research software:

1. Average Google monthly search count over the past 12 months
2. Google phrase, broad and exact matches
3. Number of google adwords ads
4. Number of google results
5. KEI ratio
6. Microsoft's OCI

I wanna keep things simple without a lot of new and unproven formulas.

Kinda makes you feel like an SEO guru or god.

I can not believe people would justify a lesser tool because they saved 50 bucks if they want to drive around town on a bicycle that's fine I'll be more than glad to drive my 500hp sports car.
I found MS difficult at first but once I learned to use it correctly all my other tools went into the backup bin.

I have tried MS and I prefer MNF as MS has to much unnecessary stuff that is not needed for niche marketers. Simple, powerful & easy and MNF fits the bill.

It does do competition analysis in the SEOC column under Keyword Research and of course in the SEOC module as well...Or do you mean something different? I'm curious!

I use both, for different projects. Over the years, I seem to have gotten all the keyword tools....Traffic Travis, Keyword Elite 1 & 2, Keyword Research Pro...I seem to use Market Samurai & Micro Niche Finder the most, though.

I have and use both. As one previous poster said - they compliment each other. While MS is very powerful it doesn't do a good job in finding keywords. Both Keyword Elite and MNF are better. Example: using MS to investigate Venture Capitilists did not come up with "Angel Investors" a key segment of the capital raising niche. MNF did.

I use MNF to generate my keywords and then I import them into MS. I then use to MS to evaluate the SEO and keywords, often using the MNF keywords as root 'tabs' of new keywords.

As to cost, both are inexpensive, offer life-time upgrades and free support. Extremely good bargins. James Jones has personally helped solved some support issues for me and I can't praise MNF support enough. They are shining examples of integrity and good business practices, especially in over delivering and customer support.

MS is an indispensable tool for me as well, simply a remarkable product for virtually pennies. From the SEO to content development, MS is an outstanding product and their training and support videos outstanding.

Good luck...Russ

Thanks for the heads up dude. My oci thingy was set to off since a couple ago. Now i can look at that extra oci indicator.

I got MNF about 1 month ago and I love it. My favorite tool is the OCI and I think the free updates are great too.

It's been a while since anybody posted in this thread, but I thought I throw my two cents in.

First, Daniel Molano, the master article marketer, who is also a forum member and product creator in good standing and of good reputation (as far as I know) wrote a very interesting review comparing Market Samurai to Micro Niche Finder. It's here:

MODERATOR: Affiliate links not allowed for product reviews, even if they're not yours.

Speaking for myself, I have been using MS for over a year now. Pretty intensively at times, I should add. I've found it to be an amazing source of data, though there are a number of things I don't like about it.

One weird quirk is that when you use Google's search tool to generate keyword lists, it doesn't match what MS gives you from the same root word or words. I imagine that this has to do with differences in local server databases. In recent months, I've actually come to consider this a "feature" since it provides more kwps (keyword phrases) to look into.

I think the MS interface is far clunkier than it needs to be. I don't like the fact that closing what most of would think of as a window shuts the program down. I find that particularly irritating.

Though it has tabs for sub-niche research, you can't change the name of the tabs (which would be handy). Speaking for myself, I often find that the name of the tab ends up becoming less relevant than some of the kwps I end up finding.

I wish there was a way to have more than one MS file (essentially, a database) open at the same time, and be able to "drag and drop" pages between them.

Another feature that's sorely lacking is being able to have presets on search parameters. If you use different kw research settings for different purposes (for instance, say George Brown's Google Sniper (micro-site) criteria vs. Daniel Molano's Newbie Blueprint (article marketing) criteria), there's no way to simply tell the app to change out the settings automatically. Yes, you have to do it manually.

It gets very old, very fast, particularly when you're researching many different niches.

Another gripe is keyword list management within the program. In some ways, MS works like a spreadsheet. Unfortunately, it's ability to control, sort and manipulate the data is much less capable than even an ancient version of Excel. For instance, you can’t actually select columns, rows or portions thereof. You must either “select all” or select/unselect a row at a time. As you can imagine, when working with 200 kwps at once, this can be cumbersome and frustrating.

Imagine if you've got a lot of crap kwps spread throughout a list of 200. Getting rid of them can be a huge pain. It's yet another reason I use Google's kwr tools most of the time, instead of the one built-in to MS (even though it supposedly draws directly from Google). For some reason, the latter seems to produce a lot of crapola.

And that’s another frustration. The 200 kwp limit. Each tab in MS is limited to 200 words. I don’t know about how others feel, but I always get the impression that MS is not telling me about kwps I would really like to know about in a particular “project” or niche.

Worse yet, there's no way to control what data is exported. You get the entire file, including columns and/rows of data you're not actually showing anymore, whether you like it or not.

It's also a tad buggy (and always has been). But I suppose that's to be expected with such a powerful program.

Insofar as support goes, in my experience the software engineers at MS are engaged, passionate and really concerned about how well their product functions. When I’ve had a problem, I’ve heard back from an actual developer – not just a customer support weenie – within hours. I think that’s pretty darn good!

Being that I'm a Mac guy, I love the fact that it's an Adobe Air product and therefore natively cross platform.

A big problem with MNF from a Mac user's standpoint is that it must be run virtually. This means you have to make your Mac into a Windows machine, at least in part.

I'm actually gearing up to install and run Windows 7 because there are several internet marketing related apps that only work under Windows itself. Traffic Travis being yet another keyword tool that falls into this category, but there are others. For instance, Automatic Article Submitter.

I don't claim to be an expert on keyword tools in general. I bought MS when it was new because it was, by all appearances, a powerful keyword tool that didn’t have monthly fees (hate those) and – most importantly of all – because it worked natively on Macs. But I will say this, based on what little I know of other tools – MS does provide a helluva lot of valuable data! Learning to sort through it and use it is a bit more complicated.

It also does have many other powerful capabilities in it’s suite of tools. One thing I like is the SEO Competition tool, where you can see how your site and others rank for certain kwps over time. The only thing I don’t like about this is that, because it’s part of MS as a whole, you have to boot MS in order to use it. I really think it would be a great (and far more useful) stand-alone tool.

In fact, I really wish MS (and this goes for many other apps as well) was entirely web-based. Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply set the SEO Competition module to run 24/7 and come back to it on an as-needed basis without having to use the somewhat chunky and clunky MS interface?

A major gripe regarding MS, now that I've seen what KeywordReasearchPro can do, is that it's not very useful for brainstorming. Also, I'm really not impressed by it's own kwp generation (as I said). I find that I get an awful lot of unrelated garbage I have to sort through. Google’s kwr tool still seems to provide better and more relevant seed words. What I do is grab those as a text file and paste them into MS, and then let MS give me all the detailed data I need.

Both programs include OCI (Overall Commercial Intent), which is a valuable indicator – though hardly a perfect one – of whether there are buyers searching for a particular kwp.

The important point that Daniel Molano makes about MNF, which he prefers over MS, is that MNF provides one bit of critical data MS does not. It’s called SOC – Strength of Competition, and it measures a number of factors as to whether a kwp is worth going after. This is something that not even the MS SEO Competition and SEO Title Competition reveals.

Assuming the algorithm behind SOC is good (I’ll take Daniel’s enthusiastic recommendation as proof that it is), this is an incredibly useful piece of data that is unmatched elsewhere.

It’s literally the driving force behind my new push to be able to use MNF. Not only does MNF provide SOC, it also provides a really cool (not to mention simple) Green/Yellow/Red light display that tells you in a glance whether the kwp you’re going after is probably a good one.

Another tool that looks really promising (again, Windows only) is KeywordResearchPro, developed by Fabian Lim. The fact he makes a living doing corporate-level SEO and runs a Adwords Qualified Company should give some indication as to the potential value of his tool.

It seems to have many of the best features of MNF and MS, though not necessarily the cool SOC “signal light,” per se. If anybody has experience with KRP, I’d love to hear about it.

thanks for the great info comparing the two.

It seems as if MS is the more robust of the two, however would it be overwelming for a novice like me to attempt utilizing it?

Then there is KeywordResearchPro, so more research is in order.

Thanks everyone,
Norm

How do you proceed with the SEOC and SEOTC data?

I've done pretty well as a mnt affiliate and wondered if ms has a affiliate program and who handles it hopefully cclickbank since I don't have any others such as plimus etc... ?

Thanks