[Niche Selection] Do you care about "Google Monthly Searches" ?

Oliver, the way I do it is:

First, I think of niches as specific needs and wants. Then I make a list of 8 to 12 things that I am passionate about or interested in that relate to a need or a want (or both).



Sometimes I get writer's block and my niche-dar isn't really working, so I might do things to get the creative juices going. I have tons of these, but let me give you a few examples....

• I will take a trip to a hobby store and have conversations with the employees, the owner, manager, etc. whomever will listen. They will tell me what's selling and what people are looking for. Sure, you can go to a hobby-type website, but you won't get the same intel as you would talking to people who live it daily.
• Talk to people. My niche-dar is on most of the time and I've gotten some of my best niche ideas by simply talking to people at social events or in public and asking them about their story. What are their hobbies? What are their passions? Usually I don't even need to ask, they will tell you what their passions and problems are.....
• Jump onto eBay and look at what's selling. For example, most marketers know that the anti-aging market is HUGE and it is a hot seller. It's also extremely competitive, but you can find niches under that market by going to eBay and doing searches for anti-aging creams, eyelid cream, etc. and see what's selling. I've found several products selling like hotcakes that I was able to tie to a couople of ebooks on the market. No one else was doing this so it was an easy money maker for me.
• Market places like Clickbank will give a ton of ideas.

There are more ways to get the juices flowing, but that should get you started.

Now Google monthly searches should only be like 1 to 3% of your overall research. Think about it, if you select a niche like say, How To Improve Your Golf Swing, how many keywords could be tied to that? Some would say dozens, others would say hundreds. Some might even say thousands.

Yes, you want people searching for certain keywords within in a niche, but there's something just as important if not more important than that and that is that the niche has buyers.

It sounds like common sense, but people tend to skip this step. I gave you the eBay trick as one example, but some other indicators that there are buyers is to look for competitors. Also look to see if people are advertising in the niche you select.

Yes, you can still find obscure niches and make money in them, but I'm looking for overall ROI. For example, there's a Warrior here who silently makes a killing selling medical equipment on one of the largest websites in the world. However, it took him a long time to finally get his process and funnel set up.

Though I do look at Google's monthly searches (for starters I tend to look at 10 to 25 keywords to see how competitive they are and who is advertising) that's only one small part of the puzzle.

Another thing to consider is the niche's distribution channels. How do you reach your potential customers? Don't limit yourself to Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Can you reach them by using free publicity? (Think press releases, radio interviews, etc.) Can you reach them with Pay Per Click, Cost Per Action, Cost Per View advertising?

Can you reach them by mail? What about using context-based ads? Potential JV partners?

If you think of niches as needs and wants, then selecting a niche is the easy part. The part where most people stumble is in how to monetize that niche. I prefer to get into niches that have plenty of products and services for me to promote, even if I have my own products because that will product more income streams.

Good luck!

RoD

I certainly look at them but I don't base my niche selection solely on number of monthly searches on Google I also look at lots of other factors including products on sale on Amazon / Ebay / Clickbank and how will they sell, trends, forums and blogs and how active they are, whether there are any big social media groups, whether people are advertising on Google for the niche and various other things.

Some markets are so huge that they have anywhere from dozens to hundreds of micro-niches.

For example, dating is a HUGE market. I personally like it, even though it has a crazy amount of competition, because it's a constant, renewable market with never-ending buyers, many of whom are rabid consumers and there are many sub and micro niches.

For example, a very popular market is the dating advice market.

You can break that down into the dating advice for men niche. You can break it down to online dating advice for men niche. There's dating advice for seniors. There's dating advice for certain other groups (think religious groups, demographics, etc.).

A micro-niche for the dating advice for men market would be text game or texting game. There is a growing demand right now in the 18 to 34 age range for single males who want to learn how to game women using texting.

Is there a demand for this?

There are hundreds of market places out there, but let's go over the Clickbank. Check out the specialized dating infoproducts that are in there, this will give you some idea on what's selling out there.

RoD

I agree that it's an extremely important (and perhaps rather under-discussed) issue. Anyway you have some great advice above.

I offer only a couple of threads ...

This might help you: Niche Selection Roadblock.

And the general "niche-selection factors" discussed in this post, too: Weight Loss Market: Still Profitable ? (Edited to add: just realised you've seen it before; sorry! ).

I don't care, myself - but only because I think I've already taken into account from other sources roughly what I'd learn there. I think it's a perfectly reasonable way of getting an indication of "whether people are looking for stuff". But be aware that "people looking" and "potential customers looking" aren't always the same.

I think looking at the AdWords can help, too: if there's a healthy number of advertisers, advertising long-term, then they're making profits. (Looking at their sites can be interesting, too, and sometimes instructive).

I think the mistake to avoid is trying to assess anything from the number of "competing sites". As far as SEO goes (and for me, it doesn't go very far at all), I always have something like 3-5 competing sites. I don't care whether they're the highest-listed 3-5 sites out of 5,000 listed in Google or the highest-listed 3-5 sites out of 30,000,000 listed in Google for the search term. It makes no difference at all to me. Either way, those are still the 3-5 sites I need to be able to outrank.

Generally, I'm more interested in what a couple of good, big newsagents can tell me than in what Google can tell me. If real people are spending real money to buy real magazines about something, then there's a market, and I'll buy some of those magazines myself to have a look, as part of my niche research, and to see whether there might be anything there for me.

(I'll always look at ClickBank, too - but that's partly my own bias, because I like selling $97+ products from ClickBank, so it's a big plus to me, if there are some decent ones there to promote.)