How I Do Niche Research

John – this is GREAT. Thanks for sharing.

~ Adam Short

Kudos for the great video!

I think Market Samurai does this same search.

Thanks John, You exposed me to a couple of tools I didn’t even know existed. Your approach makes a lot of sense.

Hi John, Thanks for once again sharing very useful, educational and original information.

There is also a complementary resource on Lulu, which teaches Niche research from first principles.
It is called Niche Goldmines Exposed – http://www.lulu.com/content/5970832

John,

Great video. One question – since you are the major authority on Outsourcing to Philippines perhaps you could start a post where the rip offs can be reported.

There are some scammers lurking on the site you recommend for outsourcing and sharing that info with fellow entrepreneurs should help to avoid the problems.

Alex

Great video. However, just checking page rank is not as accurate as determining the backlinks that point back to those sites for specific keywords. Just depends on the term you want to rank for. I use Jon Leger webcomp analyst and it does all of this research very quickly. It does not put them in a spread sheet for you though! Its a great tool though and works really fast.

John,
As always, very useful and valuable content!
Thanks,

Jim Vickers

Hey John,

Thanks for the good video. @Chris – yes market samurai does this in one pass for all the keywords.

@John – you can see how many sponsored ads are for the keyword at the top of the page: Screenshot:
http://screencast.com/t/ao2tQMTX

btw, I entered dog training individually into commercial intent tool, and came up with .59 commercial intent – your tool showed it as non-commercial.
http://screencast.com/t/Jwiq8O5lhfN

Thanks again John!
Howard

Hi John-
Wow, you really gave me some great insight I can now share with my VAs. And the tool you use. I love it when you always say, “hey, I needed that information so I asked my VA to build me a program to fetch the info.” Hilarious, you’re so inventive. That’s why your business is so valuable because you don’t just sell affiliate products, you figure out who to solve people’s problems (of course you’re blessed with the mindset to know how to program stuff and give a product spec to your VA to further chew on) .
thanks again, I’ll let you know the results soon.

Hi John,

Very instructive video. Thanks for sharing the tips.

Hi John

That really is great, thanks.

Ok, I made a spreadsheet just like yours and used the tools you suggested (downloaded your Powee’s browser tool which is amazing).

I’ve found a main keyword which is the generic name for a physical product which gets over 1 million searches (using a phrase match on google suggestion tool).

There are 22 sub keywords (variations and types of that generic product) with well over 10,000 searches each

The commercial intent for all of these ranges from 0.93 all the way up to 1. (I guess 1 is the highest).

Each have 4 to 10 pages of ads and people are paying £1.80 to £6 per click (according to google suggestion tool)

Average PR for top 10 listings on each keyword phrase range from 0-4 to 2-4 (apart from the odd amazon reference on 3 of them which comes in at a PR 5.

A lot of the companies selling these products have affiliate programs and the products costs hundreds of pounds each.

So it looks like I’ve found an unbelievable winner if I give myself 6 months to develop something. (More like a year with my skills but hey ho, patience is a virtue).

I have a big question though and would like to know what you would do or how you would approach this -

Do I focus on one keyword phrase, buy a domain containing that keyword phrase and do a review (affiliate) blog on say the top 3 products? (As determined by me).

OR

Do I build a massive review blog with a domain name that just includes the main keyword and try and cover all the sub niches/products?

OR as above but using adsense to monetarize it instead of affiliate sales as cost per click is quite high.

What would you do in this situation (apart from outsource it to a philipino of course).

Thank you very much for any suggestions in advance.

Cheers

Matt.

@Chris – Yes, you’re right. Market Samurai does automate most of this.

There are some slight differences though…

Firstly – The search figures used in Market Samurai are “daily” figures – so they’ll be 1/30.46th of the monthly figures displayed;

The number of competitors used in market Samurai is phrase-matched (web-sites who use the precise keyword in their page content);

All of the PageRank data for the top 10 sites are displayed on a single screen inside Market Samurai (so that’s the same). It will also give you backlink counts, domain ages, and PageRanks of backlinks;

And currently, the number of Adwords Advertisers is not displayed in Market Samurai… for the moment

Having said that, if you’re 4HWW’ing, there’s still the cost/benefit to consider.

Market Samurai does come at a cost – so if you’re only ever going to do a few hours of keyword research, and only looking at these 4 factors, it might be slightly cheaper to outsource the process.

But if it’s something that you’re outsourcing over and over again, there’s a substantial efficiency increase (and hourly cost decrease) with the tool.

It’s a tool we originally built for ourselves to cut down time costs, and improve the depth of keyword research that we could do – so I believe in it. (We “insource” though – i.e. have in house staff – but it’s essentially the same thing)

I hope this helps you out.

Brent

John I love You!

I know that sound weird and we have never met, but every time I watch a video or read a blog your enthusiasm make me feel just a bit happier.

So far I have been hiding my admiration in the shadows but I thought it was just about time to say how much I appreciate what you up to.

I’m going to buy replace myself soon.

AirHammer

P.S Buy Market Samurai and get all this done in about 3.2 seconds!

Hows that for a bit of social proof

Hi John

very informative and doable video. Great for those who can’t afford to pay for research tools and willing to trade time to research.

Love the msn tool as well. I use it to finalise my keyword list before I use market samurai for the detailed research.

Thank you!

I’m a huge fan of your blog & ReplaceMyself.com

Jim Cockrum put a post on his site about your niche research methods.

Very useful stuff! I’ve been using MicroNicheFinder for a while which gives you all sorts of various #’s and stats.

Your method has helped me focus on the really good #’s that I need to pay attention to and block out the extra baloney.

Thanks a bunch!

Beth

I do the same research but manually. Don’t have the Market Samurai. So would you mind sharing this tool with us? Are you that generous? It would be great if we could use the tool that you are teaching us to use. Thanks for the info.
Preston Rahn

[...] http://www.jonasblog.com/2009/04/how-i-do-niche-research.html [...]

Save yourself the head ache of all that work and get Market Samurai – best tool ever for market research!

any chance on getting the software you use to sort out the percentages of buyers for a keyword?

guys.. where dod you get the powee’s browser??

what site i freely download it??

It’s always nice to see someone showing us their strategies. The Philippines is also a wonderful place, I’ve been there 4 times. They have great people to outsource your projects to.

Price to me matters the most in this current environment, so I designed a lower priced keyword tool to do much of what you’ve shown plus find dofollow backlinks of all top ranking sites.

Hi John,

Quick question – how do you make sure your GUYS see US-centric Ads? (or whatever country you are targeting). Google will always default to showing ads based on what locality it thinks the searcher is from – so do you use tricks like &gl=us and/or supply them a proxy tool?

Thanks for sharing – haven’t joined yet, but will do soon – I’m also interested in how you weed out the Filipino scammers masquerading as people for hire – especially now that word is spreading that the Philippines is a better choice than India/Pakistan for example.

Cheers!

Robert

Robert,

If you follow the process that John suggests on his outsourcing website, there is very little chance for you to employ a scammer. In fact I think I might have been in contact with one, and thanks to the process that John shared, he was eliminated very early in the process.

[...] September 6, 2009 · Leave a Comment John Jonas talks about how to research specific market niches before building a mini-net around a new affiliate marketing p…. [...]

John, this is the best piece of advice you have given yet. Actually showing what tools you use has set me to a niche I have had picked out for a while… Great Stuff.

Cheers
JasonD

I was surprised to see this. I fully expected Microniche tool to be the software you used and how you used it to get results. A lot of talk here about market samuri which I am unfamiliar with —which is better of the two and if you do use Miccroniche keyword tool will you show us how you use it to get the results

@ Leon – thanks for sharing that the ReplaceMyself strategy helps eliminate the potential scammers. I’m a pretty experienced recruiter, but still … it helps to know the pitfalls in a strange environment.

To anyone else – you might be interested in taking a look at the relaunch of StomperNet – they are including Market Samurai in their much reduced subscription fee (which still includes everything it used to and a ton more tools included – a new split testing tool I’m currently trialling is one example). I won’t put my affiliate link here, but John should LOL!

[...] this video to learn a process for keyword testing to see if an idea had [...]

FYI, for all you folks looking for a dynamite way to do SEO research…

Go to http://tools.seobook.com/ and sign up to their list and get TONS of free tools.

One of my faves from this site is the SEO Book Keyword Tool.
Did I mention it’s free?

If you were to target those keywords with seo you would want to change to ‘exact’ match in the keyword tool otherwise you are looking at inflated figures.

Still struggling to get all my ducks in a row. I love your video about keywords and PR. Wondering though if that would be applicable for affiliates. I thought that an affiliate with a high PR would be a better than one with a low rank, am I wrong again?

Great video. The effort is fantastic. But if you are willing to pay a little bit in order to save time (and energy), I would recommend Market Samurai.

Hi when one uses Mozila unable to see page rank any idea as to why. Regards, Charles Pisano

@Doris – If you’re the one with the high PR, it’s certainly better. All PR does is help you rank highly in the search engines.

If all your competition has high PR and you’re trying to do SEO to get traffic, it’s going to be a difficult road.

FYI, if you’re looking for the MSN Keyword Tool you can find it on the other page -> http://www.jonasblog.com/2009/03/outsourcing-online-research.html

AT about 8 mins into this video, you show yourself going to a bigger page of all of the sponsored links. How do I get to this page?
It would seem like such a simple thing to do, but I can’t work it out.
I would expect there to be a “more” link or something, but I can’t see anything of the sort.

Thanks in advance

The “More Sponsored Links” feature at Google has been discontinued. This make the whole video pretty useless.
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?answer=165815&hl=en

[...] watched the video from John Jonas on niche research, he uses a pretty good firefox add on called ‘SEO for Firefox’. I’ve just tried [...]

I’m not sure this article has been mentioned yet in regards to the Commercial Intent Tool but if its content is factual (the referenced origin of the Tool’s data indicates it is)then it’s probably not wise to lean too heavily (or at all) on this part of the overall keyword research John mentions in video.
I found article in the 3rd organic spot in Google search for MSN Commercial Intent Tool. Otherwise a good systematic approach similar to my own methods.

http://newsletter.blizzardinternet.com/commercial-intent-detection-tool-review/2008/05/10/

Jonas,

Thanks for this great little formula. I used it on two niches I’ve been trying to target for lately, and it immediately highlighted which domain to buy to pretty much guarantee results — and it worked!

Thanks so much for this share.

Best Wishes,

Paul

This is a very informative video. Thanks. I can use this method to show my potential clients just how much work I would be saving them when they hire me!

Market Samurai IS the answer to your keyword research.( period)

If you want it on a plate… IMeye is your answer.

Thanks John,
How do you find out how many Google ads there are, now they have stopped showing further than Page 1 ?

[...] Decide on a market (one way to find what’s hot is to record late night TV and watch the commercials/infomercials. Those are hot products/markets) Here’s how I do niche research [...]

Thank you … it's a very clear concise video…giving me enough meat so I can immediately apply it.

Hi John,

This was one of the more worthwhile videos I’ve seen in long time. If fact, I’d say this is the info I’ve been needing for a while, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that.

I always hated going into a niche without knowing whether the hard work of doing seo, article marketing, etc. for a particular set of keywords was going to be worth it when, at the end of the day, the searcher could just be looking for free information. The commercial intent tool is exactly what I’ve been looking for, so thank you very much for taking the time to make this video!

Brian

Hi John, nice work. You explained it so simple. I hear you mention Joel Peterson mini net course? Where can i grab a hold of his course. Or can i acess it in your members area? (I am currently a member)

[...] the Keyword List Creation Tutorial Video. Also, watch these two other keyword training videos: John Jonas Keyword Training Tutorial, Online Keyword Research [...]

key word is very important when you will search for an information. It can show the number of searches in a particular time and information. This will help a specific organization launch their company at the top or highest searches among the users. This kind of training enables a person to determine and use keyword in doing computer jobs.