Art Of Money

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The goal for the rest of the Market Research stage of this project is to saturate yourself with the market that you are entering into.

Market research is a lot like an Easter egg hunt. The best and most profitable information comes to the ones who turn over the most rocks and look behind the most bushes.

Start a Document for Your Notes

Right now, you only have an idea of the topic of your site. If you talk to anyone doing search engine marketing as a consultant, there is one area where their clients consistently make the biggest mistake.

The mistake is thinking that because they are experts in their topic, they know how people search when they are looking for information about the subject.

For example, I could tell you that the topic of this site is: “Online Business” but as I search around I find that people use many other words to describe what is basically the same concept:

information products
Internet business
online business
make money online
earn money blogging
money making ideas
making money online
affiliate marketing
earn money online
make money online
Internet entrepreneur

At this point, begin to compile a list of all of the permutations of your topic at a high level. Begin to realize that, in general, the people searching for each of these phrases, is looking for slightly different things.

Finding the phrase, that BEST matches what your site offers or you think it will offer, in terms of information, and products and services to support that information, is critical to your success.

You’ll also want to begin to store any interesting information (like products or services that are a good fit for your site) from the research below into a document.

Take a lot of time at this stage, and make notes. You should begin to see what the market is hungry for in terms of information and products. Realistically you could easily plan our all of your pillar articles and many of your topics for a good long time. Also, you should begin to see and feel the pain that your market experiences.

The two things you need to prove exist in your niche…

1. Traffic for Your Topic

Search on Digg, Stumble, Netscape, Reddit for keywords related to your topic. Are they found in popular stories?

You can also try WordTracker free tool to get an idea of the daily search volume for any particular phrase.

Here are some examples from the term “make money online”…

1511 for “make money online” in the last 24 hours
366,061,205 searches ( last 90 days )

and the one from the last post:

“nursery sheet sets” shows 0 results even though it had lots of activity on eBay, so you may have to go laterally a bit to get some indication with this tool. For example…

555 for “nursery bedding”

2. Money Changing Hands

I touched on this in the last article Finding a Niche, but now you can go deeper with finding the where and how much money is changing hands around your niche or topic.

Clickbank, CJ and eBay all have ways that will give you a pretty good comparison of product sales within their systems.

Another favorite method of mine is to Google my target phrases and count the number of ads that appear on each of the results. At the bottom of the ads on the right side of the results page, click the “More Sponsored Links »” link. Then keep hitting “Next” at the bottom of the page, until you don’t get the “Next” link anymore.

Since the serious AdWords buyers track which ads are converting best and therefore target the ads that make the most money, by looking at which keywords have the most ads being displayed you can get a pretty good idea of which keywords are the most profitable.

Sample Data on My Keywords

This results are not even that useful, in reality there are too many ads here. To do this properly I would need to drill down into each of the results that show 200+ results and find the numbers for the sub keywords, but you get the idea…some keywords have more ads than others and this is a good measure of the profit potential of the keyword.

information products 24
Internet business 200+
online business 200+
make money online 200+
earn money blogging 40
money making ideas 200+
making money online 200+
affiliate marketing 200+
earn money online 200+
Internet entrepreneur 53

Tips for completing this exercise:

1. Don’t be logged into your Gmail or any other Google account, like Reader, while doing this or any other market research. Google will show “personalized” results based on your history if you are logged in. You want generic results.
2. Don’t compare your results to the one I show below. The “make money online” niche is a silly example because it is so ubiquitous online
3. AVOID at all costs, using “make money online” or any form of it as a topic for your site, unless you can really bring something new to the table. For some reason many people who want to make money online, starts a site about making money online. A topic, which they know nothing about. If you are reading this series and actually learning anything, then “make money online” is not the topic for you.

If you have a more advanced keyword tool like keyword elite (take a look at project number 5), you can take your market research to another level by tracking which ads appear over time. Presumably only ads that are making money will remain over the course of weeks or months.

By having a way to track and know which ads have staying power, you can gain a huge competitive advantage. The information that you’ll know is: which ads make money (meaning the language of the ad), which target site is converting or selling products well enough to sustain an ad, and which keywords are converting into sales.

Trends

It’s good to be aware of trends but they are much more important in things like domaining than blogging. One site of mine is in a thoroughly doomed niche. Due to electronic advances, it will be extinct at some point in the future, but even though the industry as a whole declines at 10% a year, the amount being spent online in this industry continues to rise.

Find trend information.

In general, as far as trends go, the trend towards anything online is so strong that it is hard to go wrong. Of course if you can catch a great wave, right as the magic is going to happen, then so much the better.

Summary of Market Research for a Profitable Blog

This was a meaty look at some basic market research. At this point I’m guessing that you’re falling into one of two camps.

1. “OMG this makes having a job look better and better.”

2. “Wow, this is way cool. Finally I’m won’t have to guess anymore about whether or not I can make money with a certain topic.”

Domain expertise is what we’re after, and you’re now well on the way.

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