Welcome to all the new members who joined our group during this last week.
Today we will start on a series of articles that is aimed at helping in the task of researching for a niche market. It is one of the tasks that the majority of new marketers, as well as a lot of not so new marketers, have no idea how to complete properly. The task is usually skimped or only done in a very general nature that serves no real purpose.

The mistake generally made is that the marketer finds a product that they particularly like and then try to find a market for it. This is not the way to find a profitable niche market that will prove to be successful for you.
First you must find the niche market. One that has a reasonable demand (number of searches) and there is a shortage in the supply for the demands being made. (Something is needed but not available.)

Anyway, enough for now. The article will explain how to go about your research.

This week's contents:

1. This week's article entitled "Niche Marketing - Researching for niche keywords Part 1"
2. Some videos to help in the research
3. This week's tip.

1. This week's article

A niche market is a tightly focused, targetable portion of a market. A business that focuses on such a niche market, and addresses the need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers, will flourish. The whole point of finding your niche market is so that you can cater to all their needs. The truth is, running two or three web sites that each target a specific niche market is the simplest way to make money on the Internet.

The trick in capitalizing on a niche market is to find or develop a market niche that has customers who are accessible, that is growing fast enough, and that is not owned by one established vendor already.
The main purpose is to find a small corner of the market within a topic. A topic would equate to a market for "dogs" or "home decoration". The term "dog grooming brush" or "cut glass vases" would be considered a niche market within its topic.

The initial stage of researching for the niche market is to start with the topic that is of interest to you. You should remember that there is not an absolute requirement for you to know all about your niche, but it helps if you have some interest or a little knowledge. At this point the research is to look at each topic moving down through the levels and making notes of keywords that you feel may be of interest. You must remember that the research is still very general and the keywords that you list will be studied in greater detail during the next research phase.

Using the tools within Google and Yahoo start by looking at topics that may be of interest to you, or you feel may be something that could prove to hold a niche that you could take advantage of. List all the interesting topics as keywords. Some may not even be relevant to the topic being researched, but may provide another source of potential niches when further researched. Initially start with broad topics, then drill down as well as sideways, making a list of all the interesting keywords for further research.

You may not even be aware of the tools available to you through the Google and Yahoo search facilities. Here are a few places to start:

• Google directory at www.google.com/dirhp
• Google options at http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/index.html - select what you want and dig deep. From the Options page, click on "Lab" and it will open another page of features that you can use such as:
  
  • Google Sets at http://labs.google.com/sets
  • Google Trends at http://www.google.com/trends
  • Google Suggests at http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
• Yahoo Buzz at www.buzz.yahoo.com
• Yahoo directory at http://dir.yahoo.com/
• Yahoo answers at http://answers.yahoo.com/

There are many other places to search, some are shown below.

• Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/
• Barnes&Noble at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/
• Ebay at http://www.ebay.com/

Every keyword that you find that may be an interesting topic or niche should be added to your list. This list will possibly get to be quite large and may well end up with close on 100 keywords that you have found. Obviously a large percentage will not survive the next phase where you will research each of these keywords to see whether or not they offer a viable business opportunity. This stage will be covered in Part 2 of this article series.

2. Some videos to help in the research

During the past week I found a really fantastic set of inexpensive videos that go through the whole niche market research process step by step. I must say that I have now found some research resources that I have never used before and have been looking for another niche market for myself. I suggest that you take a look - I was impressed with the detail provided. Be patient as it starts with a slide show type of presentation, but the good stuff starts in one of the later videos, part 3 to be exact.

http://www.newbieshelp.com/Adtrakz/go.php?c=nnmr

This week's tip.

If you are going to use Web 2 to generate traffic to your website, don't dive in just because it's cool or because you read an article about it. Be clear about what you're trying to accomplish, how much you're willing to invest and what time frame you are working on. Like any aspect of your business - plan ahead.

As you will have noted, I am trying to streamline the work effort with respect to this newsletter. In the near future it will be available only at the website, which reduces the amount of work I have to do to load it there as well as the different formats necessary for the email version. It will still be issued weekly and an email will be issued to you with the link to the newsletter at the website.

I hope that this week's issue was of interest to you, and maybe you found something that would be helpful in your own business. If so, I would appreciate any feedback you may have so that I can align future content to better suit your needs. Send them to [mailto:newsletter@newbieshelp.com]

Sincerely,
Derek Jones
Newbies Help - Editor

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