How do you do your research? Adwords - Market Samurai ...Something else?

I always use Adwords keywords to see if my niche keywords have at least 1000 search results. If it does then I find some affiliate products to sell. But, with all of this I simply key in my best keywords in to Google search to see how many folks are in my niche. I like to know what they are selling and how they design their blogs. I also do a scam search on the products I plan on marketing.

You'll find some great tips for researching for content in this thread.

Start out where people are spending money and work backwards from there!

That way you never waste time + find out your niche never spend money! (which sucks)

Daniel

i use senuke for my research. i will get the easy or hard level competition from hundred of keywords or niches, and i just choose the easy level competition for my site.

I ll give a demo try at Market Samurai to see what it offer's...

I will use MNF and then check the competition in the top 10 using Market Samurai.

Market Samurai uses Google Keywords Tool as the resource for most of it's keyword stats. But if you have the paid option it has some very useful options for competition research on your chosen keyword.

Get the free trial. A tip if you want the trial............go to The Challenge and use his trial offer and you can get 3 months free rather than the usual trial 1 or 2 weeks.

I use long tail pro for my keyword research if I discovered a niche that I feel I can compete in and that people are spending money in.

Check your keyword/ niche in amazon books and see if there's a book/ digital product made. If so, people are most likely spending money in that niche and that's usually a good sign.

There's other ways to research a niche... Just poke around the forum and you'll find other ways. Hope this helps.

Thank you everybody for your ideas and methodology on research!

It was a great help, not just for me i believe, but for many people that read the topic!

None of the above. I use magazines -- Discount Magazine Subscriptions & Deals | Magazines.com

If there are no magazines with ADVERTISERS covering a niche, then it's not a viable niche for IM.

Once you find a magazine you're interested in, you'll discover a target audience.

Then you can use the magazine's demographics to learn about that audience. Mass market magazines spend hundreds of thousands of dollars surveying their audience for their advertisers. You get the benefit of all that research for free.

If you're considering creating a blog, you want a keen audience which is online, and which BUYS stuff. This is vital. You shouldn't guess about this stuff, you should KNOW.

Magazine demographics help you to KNOW.

For example, I went to the Health/ Fitness category at magazines.com, and found Prevention magazine. Then I went to the mag's website: Prevention: Healthy Living Tips, Fitness, Recipes, Diet, Beauty

In the footer of the page, I followed the link Rodale (Corporate)/ Medit Kit to this page: Media Kit | Prevention

I clicked on the link: PRINT/ 2012 Demographic Profile -- Full Circulation, and got a nifty PDF which tells me that Prevention's total audience is over 9 million, the median age of reader is 56, 65% are college graduates, and more.

You'll find demographic info under an "advertisers" link, usually. In Prevention's case, it was under "media kit."

OK, now to find a blog idea which would suit Prevention's audience.

The categories at the top of the Prevention home page are: health, weight loss, fitness, food and beauty.

If I were looking for a niche blog idea, I'd scout the categories.

I'd do a lot more research on AUDIENCE before I worried about keywords...

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Angela

To research the market or audience I generally use Quantcast which is the part of Market Samurai software.

Similar to angela99's post, I go to amazon and find magazine and book best sellers. I try to see which are popular and find topics people are interested in. Other than that I use Google Kwd Tool & MNF to brainstorm, and then Market Samurai for competition analysis.

I use a combination of the Adwords tool and the free version of Traffic Travis. This has worked well for me. Good luck.

I wish good luck to all of you!

This is after all a great topic to keep updating!

You don't need to buy any tools...just use the trusty ol Google Keyword tool. It's free and most of these other tools use all of their data anyway!

-Omar