Niche research can be challenging – but there’s a simple way to get ideas, whether it’s for an affiliate product or for your own information product.

One of the best ways to find a hot selling product is to look for a problem that lots of people are facing, and then offer them a solution.

But where do you find people talking about their problems? Well, wherever people ‘hang out’ to chat – particularly in online forums, especially if they are busy ones.

You can locate suitable Forums by browsing through directories listing online forums – such as www.big-boards.com.

Or you can search for them using search engines by typing in the search term: “(Your niche topic) + discussion forums” - using the inverted commas (“”) for a ‘Broad Match’ search.

You can tell if a forum is suitable for your niche research by looking at how often people post there, and how recent the latest post is. If there are few visitors in the last few days, the forum’s probably not suitable for your needs.

Check the quality of the discussion before you make your decision to use that forum or not – and then move on to the next one.

The best way to do your research will vary from forum to forum. But generally, you should look for ‘hot’ threads – discussion topics where there are a large number of page views or responses.

For example, if a discussion has over 400 views in a day, or over 1,000 views in 3 days, the topic is likely to have great potential, and will show you what are the ‘triggers’ that will get your target market’s attention – and the issues or problems they are seeking solutions to.

If you often see the same or similar questions being asked on forums, this can indicate an opportunity you can tap into.

So think of a topic and go and look at some forums!

Happy Niche research!

John

Have you spent any time recently looking at Google Books?

It’s amazing what you can find there… Anything from Shakespeare to the day’s ‘Random Category’ – be it Steam Engines, Confucianism, Housekeeping, Self-development, Political Psychology or Arboriculture!

And there are plenty of classics — from Francis Bacon to Napoleon Hill.

Sadly, they don’t yet have a category of ‘Internet Marketing’ or ‘Web Business’ – or even just ‘Business’ for that matter!

But you can search the millions of books already available — try searching for ‘copywriting‘ – there are some useful resources!

But there is a wealth of material and you can often pick up a lot of valuable information at no cost.

Not surprisingly, the whole site is geared to getting you to buy the books you look at—which you can do through a range of bookstores.

So, all in all, it has similarities to Amazon and some other online Bookstores that increasingly allow you to ‘see inside’ the books on offer.

Google Books does, however, allow you to look at much more of the material inside a book than other sources—and there are some where you can read quite a few chapters—even if the deliberate policy of missing alternate pages (or whole sections) in some chapters can spoil your fun a bit!

So go over and have a look at http://books.google.com/books

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

A topic that came up in two recent consultancy calls with Mastermind Program Members was using the correct spelling and language for your target market – and then directing them to the appropriate affiliate website to make their purchase.

Let’s look at a physical product that can be marketed through a Hub and Mini-site strategy – for instance ‘Media Centres’ (but don’t ask me what they do!).

First question… Who is my target market?

Second question… Where are they?

Third Question… What style of language do they use – ie how do I need to ‘speak’ to get their interest?

The Center of The Matter

Let’s look at media centres – or is it centers…? ‘Media Centre’ is the British English spelling… The Americans would refer to a ‘Media Center’.

To see what I’m talking about, do a Google search on the term ‘samsung media center’… When I did this, the first result was for ‘Samsung United States’, using the spelling ‘Center’, and so on down the list. When I spelled it ‘centre’, some UK suppliers appeared in the top few listings who did not appear for the other spelling (along with Samsung USA again!).

Now Google’s search algorithms are clever enough to get round the spelling question, so ‘center’ comes up even when I type in ‘centre’ – particularly as that is the spelling used by the manufacturer. And Google directs me to search using Google.co.uk anyway, whereas in the USA, they’ll be using Google.com with it’s algorithms set to focus on US-based searches.

What The Domain…?

But all this becomes more important when you’re selecting your Domain name for a Mini-site, doesn’t it?

If you choose ‘SamsungYH-999GSMediaCentre.com’ as your domain name, and use this spelling on your web pages, you’ll get British-oriented (UK) traffic – if indeed you get any, as Samsung don’t call it this (they use Center). If you want to target American traffic, you’d need to use the ‘Center’ spelling.

You can check on sites like Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk that focus separately on the US and UK markets and see what comes up for ‘Samsung YH-999GS Media Centre’. For my search, Amazon.com returned ads while Amazon.co.uk didn’t.

Now, if I live in the USA and I’m looking for a ‘media center’, I’ll expect it to be sold, and delivered within, the USA. I don’t know what these British pound thingies are (and the price converted into dollars is higher) and I don’t want to wait three weeks (or pay for) my purchase to be shipped across ‘the Pond’.

And vice-versa. If I buy on-line in the UK, I want it to be delivered tomorrow from a UK supplier (but see ‘Side Note’ below).

So make sure your supplier/portal matches your market… and your target product.

Side Note – Arbitrage: It’s sometimes cheaper to buy in US$ and get it shipped from the USA – subject to taxes, duties, warranties, servicing requirements, etc… So there can be opportunities for ‘arbitrage’ for uncomplicated products, by sourcing/shipping them cheaper from the US than consumers can buy them in the UK… but let’s save that for another blog post!

Divided By A Common Language

And don’t forget to use the appropriate words that your target market uses. Terminology can change between countries, states and even counties. An example I came across recently was the terminology used by different State administrations for corrective driving courses for speeding offenders in the USA. Nearly every state calls it something different (I don’t have space here to list them all!) – so you’d need state-specific web pages if you were marketing this product…!

The Moral Of The Story: So, when you’re selecting your domain name, make sure that you’re targeting your market correctly, using the right spellings for the market – and as used by the product supplier – and that you’re directing your prospects to the most appropriate seller.

This isn’t really complicated – but I hope the above will help you focus on getting things right rather faster than if you have to find out for yourself… the hard way!

PS: See my blog post “The Anatomy of Great Copy ” on how to find some of the answers posed above…

Happy marketing!

John Thornely
Internet Tycoons

If you want to succeed online, you have to have a strategy (or theme, a purpose, or community) for your website, with a central focus on a specific WANT that your prospects have. Then, you find products which follow along the theme.

So, the three keys to creating income from ANY web site and ANY theme, according to Terry Dean, are:

1. Have a lead product that people WANT.

2. Have freebies at your site that follow the theme.

3. Have multiple backend or supporting products for the theme.

You can’t develop a business around a single product. Even if you are promoting a single product upfront, it is not the product that people want.

They want the BENEFITS they receive out of the product.

When designing your site, think about that ever abiding “WANT” or “GOALS” that your prospects have with them continually.

Things such as: more money, weight loss, online success, being sexually attractive, self-defense, etc.

These ultimate benefits are what your prospects are really seeking.

So, don’t base your business just on products.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

Urmil and I had a another very interesting 2-on-1 consultancy call with one of the Mastermind Program Members recently, which covered a lot of great insights into how to get high rankings for a website!

And I thought you’d also like to share some of the ‘insider’ tips on linking strategies that emerged – so here goes…

As I mentioned in my recent blog post Linking Tips To Improve Your Search Engine Ranking, you can’t just put up a single website and expect customers to find it amongst all the other billions of websites out there! You need to build you own little net of interlinked websites to catch the traffic you seek – and with billions of searches a day there’s lots of traffic out there to catch!

The linked Hub and satellite Mini-Sites model is about catching free highly motivated and targeted search traffic from Google and the other search engines and driving it to niche product mini-sites and then channelling this traffic through affiliate links on your Hub sites to merchants such as Amazon, collecting a commission on all purchases.

Bear in mind also that there are two types of buyer that you’re looking to capture:
•    Those that know exactly the product they want to buy (eg a Samsung Digital Media Centre – YPK-5JZB)
•    Those that are still looking generically for a ‘Media Centre’

So you’re trying to get the first group to click through the links on your Mini-Site dedicated to a specific product and shepherd the latter group to your Hub Site, where they can compare various models and make a buying decision.

Now, your Hub Site is going to be positioned in a fairly competitive market – I looked at Google search and competition criteria for your Mini-Sites in an earlier Blog Post – Niche Product Strategies For Your Hub And Mini-Sites.

So your ‘web’ of Mini-Sites is there to trawl for traffic from lower-competition keyword searches and send this to your Hub-Site, as well as creating a ‘net’ of inbound links to your Hub sites to improve their ranking.

The major purpose of your Mini-Sites is thus to get high ranking in Google as ‘content-rich’ traffic-catching web pages. Each Mini-Site should thus focus on one product and each Mini-Site page should be focussed on, and optimised for, one keyword (or ‘long-tail’ keyword string) relating to that product.

The primary links on your Mini-Site pages should be contextual (keyword-based) and should link to the relevant product page on your Hub Site, providing in-bound links to your Hub site.

You should also include links on the bottom of your Mini-site pages to other Mini-sites, to spread your ‘web’ and get Google ranking ‘credit’. But make sure your links aren’t ‘reciprocal’ – site A should link to Site B, B to C, and C to A, etc – no two sites should just ‘swap’ links back to each other, as Google discounts these.

Your Hub Site is the portal to your suppliers, so the primary links on your individual Hub Site pages should link to your suppliers, through your affiliate links. Your Hub sites can also carry page-bottom links to other Hub sites, but should not link back to your Mini-Sites.

Other linking strategies you should use include:
•    your internal links between pages – you should particularly make sure that your ‘Site Map’ is properly set up and all the links work properly, so that the spiders can crawl through every page of your site and onward to your other sites using the links discussed above.
•    Your Useful Links page can be used to boost your search engine ranking by linking to other, unrelated websites. Again, the Useful Links on your Mini-site should link to other Mini-sites; those on your Hub-site should link to other Hub-sites. The linked sites need not be on related topics – your ‘media centre’ site can link to your ‘freezer’ site, etc – all you’re seeking to do is provide the conduit for the spiders to find each of your sites and to improve your search engine score by providing in-bound links. Again, no two sites should link reciprocally to each other – always link A to B to C, etc.

This can all get to sound a bit complicated but the underlying principle is Keep It Simple – think like your prospects when writing the text and setting up the purchasing process and think like a search engine when setting up the linking strategy.

Happy linking!
John Thornely
Internet Tycoons

“My website looks very nice — but I don’t get any enquiries or sales from it”.

How many times have you heard that?

My first website — a property site — cost me far more than it should have, because I didn’t really know anything about selling on the web. I put the site before the customer.

I hunted around until I found someone who seemed to offer the kind of site I was looking for. She produced a nice-looking website (she was a graphic designer!) — but one that was subsequently described to me by a copywriter as being ‘typically corporate in approach’ — all about ‘us’, with no great appeal to a visitor, no single focus and no convincing call to action.

A bit of a put-down, heh?

And — more importantly — no great traffic as a result! Even though the site eventually reached a Google page ranking of 3 (by reason of the large amount of information I put up on it), it didn’t bring in the punters.

Was this the web designer’s fault or mine?

The answer is — both! It was a case of ‘the blind leading the blind’. I hadn’t really worked out who my targets were and how to win them over, and she didn’t understand enough about commercial marketing to make me do this before even starting out on formulating the website. She ‘did’ corporate brochures!

All About Us – Not You!

The typical website out there is ‘all about us’ and little or nothing about the visitor or what they actually want. Never forget that someone only visits your website because they are looking for information or to solve a problem or need. Think about it — what are you looking for when you browse the Web?

This is why the standard ‘corporate style brochure’ on a web page really doesn’t work. Your website needs to capture your visitor, entice him/her to stay and browse further — no matter what business you’re in!

You can actually do this very easily: create a site which is full of information — full of ‘nuggets’ the visitor gets an immediate benefit from — and where they’ll want to return.

Mouthwatering Detail

Develop a site that describes, in mouthwatering detail, how your product or service

creates the exact results they’re looking for.

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in — whether you are directly selling a product, building a list of prospects or a public service website — you still need to fulfill your visitors’ needs and involve them, if you want them to return to your site and find it valuable.

The Big Myth

And here’s a BIG MYTH. Most businesses’ websites will not make a sale on a prospect’s first visit — unless you make them an ‘irresistible offer’ so compelling that your visitor just can’t go without buying (which many single-page sites can do, with good copywriting).

Typical ‘conversion rates’ that the experts achieve are only in the range 1 to 5% of visitors — so 95 to 99 of every 100 visitors to your site are likely to leave without buying.

So your website should focus on starting a relationship with your prospect, so that you can convert perhaps another 20 – 30% of your visitors over time. You need to engage with your visitor and make it worthwhile for them to do two things:

· Opt in to your ‘free offer’ and

· Return to your site later to buy.

If you succeed in getting your visitor to opt in, you can build your relationship — and this is primarily about building his/her trust in you — and encourage him/her to return to your website, for instance using a series of emails sent out by autoresponder. Tests typically show that it may take anything from 5 to 10 contacts with a prospect before they trust you enough to buy.

Clear Site

One of the most successful commercial website styles is one that looks like a letter. It can be a single site or multiple-page site (each ‘page’ can be hundreds or thousands of words long).

Each page should look like a letter and each should aim to promote a single product or service — gently but inexorably leading your visitor through to a specific action, whether it be to opt-in, download a free report that contains more information or to purchase.

Unless your site is purely for information, it should not have numerous links and buttons at the top or down the side of the page, which can distract the reader and lead them away from your site.

The exception to this (for example, see the diabetes site mentioned above), is where the whole of a multi-page site acts as a carefully crafted sales machine, focused on getting the visitor to opt-in and return again.

Lead Your Prospect

Interwoven into the text (‘copy’) on your site, you should have links to request your free report or whatever is being offered. These links, scattered throughout the letter, lead to a form for the visitor to complete, so you capture (as a minimum) their first name and email address, with permission to stay in touch.

Getting this permission (hence ‘permission marketing’) is absolutely necessary if your visitor is located in a country that has ‘data protection’ or privacy policies, such as the UK.

And don’t worry about what to give as a ’free report’. This can be distilled sections of a few chapters of your information product (if that’s what you’re offering) — some marketers simply adapt sections of the sales letter on their web page!

You can use this direct response website approach to identify your target audience — visitors literally ‘hold up their hand’ by requesting your free report (although there are quite a few ‘freebie seekers’ out there, too).

Once you have your visitor’s contact details, you can nurture a relationship with informative emails until he/she is ready to purchase from you.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

Did you know that there’s a very simple way to get Amazon to find your Niche Products for you?

Go to www.Amazon.com or www.Amazon.co.uk and select a ‘Department’ from the drop-down menu at the top left of the main page or  the fixed menu on the left side. Let’s select ‘Camera, Photo & Video’ from the ‘Electronics’ Department (‘Camera & Photo’ on .co.uk).

As well as category listings and a search box, you’ll also see ‘Most Wanted’ and ‘Best Deals’ listings (we’ll come back to these a little later).

On the menu bar at the top, click on ‘Bestsellers’ and you’ll get a page listing all the hot products that are selling best at present. In other words, Amazon is telling you what products people are buying most of right now! And you can safely assume that people are searching for those products to buy (although the two things are not identical)!

Ideas on a Plate!

Now, did your competition in the ‘bricks and mortar’ world ever tell you straight out what was selling best? Talk about giving you ideas on a plate!

But it doesn’t stop there, there’s plenty more…!

In the top left corner, under ‘More in Camera and Photo’, you’ll see four more categories that are of distinct interest to you…
* Hot New Releases (or Hot Future Releases on .co.uk)
* Most Gifted
* Most Wished For
* Movers & Shakers

While there are some variations, these pages will display many of the same products, underlining what’s selling well. The ‘Movers & Shakers’ page also shows you how the rankings are changing – ie what’s ‘hotting up’ just now!

The only thing Amazon doesn’t tell you is how many of each product they sold and from which suppliers, but you can check out the top ranking sites just by clicking through the links on the Amazon pages!

Niche Ideas

Now, let’s put all of this together and think about what Amazon is telling us about your potential niche markets…

Go back to the ‘Bestsellers’ page. At the time of writing, Canon cameras occupied 10 of the top 15 spots, while Flip video cameras occupied 3. So you could set up a Hub site offering Canon cameras and a series of Mini-Sites for individual Canon camera models (and accessories for each, too of course).

Keep an eye on the Hot New Releases and Movers & Shakers pages and add new Mini-Sites and Hubsite pages for new products.

And don’t forget to target keywords and page titles, etc, to respond to the ‘Most Gifted’ and ‘Most Wanted’ items.

You’ll note that the top sellers on Amazon.com, which is aimed at the North American market, are different from what’s selling fastest in the UK on Amazon.co.uk. So think about which market you’re targeting with your niche sites and how to optimize for that market.

Don’t forget your Research!

And before you rush in and set up mini-sites galore, though, don’t forget to do your research and optimise your website for both longer-tail keywords – but don’t leave out the more competitive keywords from your pages, either.

Have a think about some of the criteria I discussed in ‘Niche Product Strategies For Your Hub And Mini-Sites‘.

Check the number of searches using Google’s keyword tool. So, for example, when I looked there were 450,000  searches a month in the UK for ‘Canon Powershot’ and 8,100 for ‘Canon PowerShot SD1100IS’ – a pretty healthy market!

And make sure you check the product type numbers available in the market you are targeting before you optimise your page – you don’t want to set up to sell models that aren’t available in the country you’re targeting, do you!

Do a ‘broad match’ search for ‘Canon Powershot SD1100IS’ on Google and you’ll see there are around 27,000 competing sites. A ‘phrase match’ search – ie using “” marks around the phrase – indicates only 4,900 or so competing sites, so there’s surprisingly low competition for such an in-demand product.

And don’t forget you can see the keywords your competition are using and how they’re attracting customers by using tools like www.keywordspy.com and www.spyfoo.com!

Talk about giving it to you on a plate…!

Happy Niche-ing!
John Thornely
Internet Tycoons

Google added a new set of tools on it’s search pages last month that will help you find new untapped niches!

So go and check out the enhanced Search Options capabilities – including the ‘Wonder Wheel’!

First, go to Google and do a search – say for “lose weight”. On the results page, look just below the Google logo (in the light blue bar below the line), and click on ‘Show Options’.

Down the left side, you’ll see a menu of options. Click on ‘Wonder Wheel’ and you get a map of your search term and related search terms – the spokes.

Click on any of the spokes and you begin to dig into sub-niches – just keep repeating to find sub-sub-niches.

You can also get a list of similar results (spokes of the wheel) by clicking on the ‘Related Searches’ link in the menu on the left side.

At each step, check the number of results for the search (in the upper right hand corner) until you get to a ‘manageable niche’ (say <200k websites) where you’ll be able to compete effectively for the keyword… You can also use the phrase-match option by putting your search term in “inverted commas”.

And don’t forget to check the organic and paid search results being displayed on the right side of the page (your competitors).

Also, click on ‘Review Sites’ and ‘Forums’ to check out the opposition or find topics or material for your own pages!

Pretty useful and quick way of checking out niches – huh?

Oh, and the spokes of the Wonder Wheel should give you ideas for associated products and further pages for your website…

And don’t forget to check out the other Search Options – you can filter by time period and the Timeline gives a useful indication of interest in a topic (and is a bit faster to use than Google Trends for a ‘quick-and-dirty’ appraisal).

When you use the Search Options in conjunction with Google’s Keyword Tool (just type the niche term into the tool to check the number of searches for that and related terms) and Google Trends tool, you’ve got some of the fastest and most powerful free research tools available to internet marketers!

Click on the screen below to see Google’s summary of Search Options and the Wonder Wheel!

Happy niche-spotting!

Using Google to find HOT Niches!

Want to dominate the Web — but Stuck for ideas for niches?

Would you believe that Google will actually show you how you can make money on the Web? Sounds too good to be true?

Well, here are three ways that Google will show you exactly what’s hot just now — and what products sell on a seasonal basis!

What’s Hot Just Now, Mr Google?

Here’s a little trick using Google Products (formerly ‘Froogle^TM’), a focused search engine that allows you to search for products for sale on the internet.

But you can also use it to see what’s hot today and what people want right now!

Go to www.google.com/products and look at the list of products below the search box. They are stuff that people are searching for right now!

Now, press ‘refresh’ and you’ll see a new list come up — these are live searches on Google, so you can see the kind of things that people are currently searching for.

Look for the products that come up most frequently and find ways to turn them into

niche products you can offer!

Trendy Niches!

You can use Google Trends in a similar way, but it also lets you see seasonal trends and even compare different search topics on the same page — a very powerful research tool.

Go to www.google.com/trends and you’ll see two lists. The one just below the search box shows you what people are searching for just now. The numbered list below that shows you Today’s Hot Trends.

You can also see an expanded list of hot trends at www.google.com/trends/hottrends.

These are things that thousands of people are searching for now, so use some of the ideas on www.Internet-Tycoons.com to see how you can provide what they want!

‘Tis The Season!

You can even compare searches by entering several topics in the Trends search bar, separated by commas! Try looking at the seasonal trends for searches on Fishing, Cricket and Baseball.

Not surprisingly there are spikes around special events, such as the World Cup and so on.

Target Your City!

But there’s another very powerful tool to aid your Web domination strategy hidden away in Google Trends!

Below the trend graphs, you’ll see a list of the Countries and the Cities where the terms were searched for most often. You’ll also see the Languages that were used most frequently to search for the terms.

This is very powerful information — you can target particular countries where topics are particularly hot. And—just think about this— you can even target particular cities with your Adwords campaigns, to maximise their effectiveness and minimise your Awords costs by making your keywords location-specific!

You can even target Google searches in particular languages, where you’ll probably

find that there is little or no competition for very valuable keywords and dominate the market!

Where’s Your Zeitgeist?

Google Zeitgeist is a treasure trove of research and information for your Web Biz!

Anything from Google Trends, what’s behind the stories, and the most popular searches last year and by month.

You can actually do this for each country in the world. Try ‘Bodyboard’ in Brazil, ‘Rabbits’ in Canada or ‘Jack Russel’ (dogs) in Norway!

And Zeitgeist will also show you the headline gainers and losers this month, guiding you as to what’s hot and what’s not!

Go to www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html, open your mind and explore!

So, with this enormous research arsenal at your fingertips, what’s holding you back?

Get out there and get HOT!

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com 2008

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com

Before you spend a lot of money setting up in your chosen niche, you’ll want to research it thoroughly and test it out, to see what traffic you get and the quality of this traffic – are they ‘hot buyers’ or just browsers?

Hot Tip: One of the ways that you test a niche, before you get started, is to send some traffic to an affiliate site (you sign up as an Affiliate to sell someone else’s product – they’ll generally set up a website for you). If you are getting sales as an affiliate, then you could make sales with your own product.

John Thornely
© John Thornely www.johnthornely.com

To learn more about how YOU can
Profit From The Internet – Fast, visit
www.Internet-Tycoons.com