Brett’s Niche Marketing Blog

OK, so let’s pretend that you’re car shopping and have the money in your pocket to buy it today.  Do you think, “I want a car today.” and just buy the first car you see?  Probably not!

People who are using the Internet are exactly like that as well.  When they’re searching for something on a search engine, they type in very specific things that they want more information on…or, more importantly, want to buy.

So, they’d type in something like, “Mercedes 500 series” or “BMW 400i Series” instead of “car”. So, if your keywords were based around “car”, chances are, you wouldn’t see that potential customer.  That makes sense, doesn’t it?

SO…let’s narrow down the information we got from Scot at www.nicheaday.com. Every day, Scot sends you a niche and, attached to each email is an Excel worksheet with the top 1000 searches for sub-categories of that main keyword!  It looks like this:

That’s pretty amazing!  In ONE MONTH, over 700,000 people searched for the word “candle”!

Don’t go crazy here quite yet!

If you go to Google and type in “candle” WITH THE QUOTATION MARKS,  you’ll see that there are over 39 MILLION competing sites.

Just copy each keyword phrase and paste it into Google, making sure to have quotation marks both before and after the phrase. Make a note of how many competing sites there are.  You can see that at the top of the page…something like this: Results 1 – 10 of about 150,000 for “birthday candle” This whole process takes…MAYBE…10 minutes. So your spreadsheet ends up looking like this:

Let’s take a look at those figures for a moment and see what they tell us.

The top 10 searches show a total of OVER 2 million searches per month!  That must be a good thing, right?  Well, maybe not necessarily. More than 40 MILLION competing sites gobbled those 2 million searches right up.  Roughly, each site gets a visitor every 20 days.

Remember that “big frog in a little pond” thing?

That process above can…and will…get a little tiresome, SO….

Here’s a special undisclosed bonus for reading this post.  It’s a copy of the very spreadsheet I use to analyze the keywords that I get from Scot.

It’s an Excel spreadsheet, so you’ll need Excel or Open Office to use it. You can download it by clicking here.  This is in a ZIP file, so you’ll need WinZip to unzip it. Unzip it and set it aside for a second or two.

Now here’s what you do:  open up Scot’s Excel spreadsheet in another window and look for keywords that get at least 100 searches per day…that would be 3000 per month or better on Scot’s list.

Go to Google and copy and past the keyword into the search box, making sure to include quotes before and after the keyword. Remember, we are doing a phrase match search. Copy the number of results you get…i.e. “1-10 of about 16,200”…just copy the 16200, nothing else. Paste that into the template you just downloaded from here and you’ll see a number appear.  Do that for all the keywords you want to research.

BTW: If you have already done this from above you can just copy and paste the results you already have straight into the first 3 columns of the spreadsheet and you are all set.

Here’s what a sample of “candle” looks like…at least the first 10!

Now, all you have to do is click at the top of the “results” column to highlight it and then go up to “Data” and click “Sort” and choose “Ascending”.  The program will automatically sort your keywords from lowest to highest.

WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR IS THE LOWEST…THE CLOSER TO ZERO THE BETTER.

The keyword “candle holders” is the winner in this example.

What that all means is that, the keyword “candle holders” has less competition than any of the other terms analyzed.

THAT’S what you’re looking for…A LITTLE POND!

That little pond still gets 815,711 searches per month or about 27,000 searches per day!  How many of those searches could you capture if you were on the first page of the search results?

You’ll find other great competition ratios in the list if you take the time to do it.  And you DO need to do it!

For each major keyword…i.e. “candle”…you need to find 30 great competitive keywords just like you did a moment ago.  You’re going to be writing an article based around each of those keywords here after while.

In this chapter, you’ve learned how to find a little pond that is VERY active.  Now all you need to do is learn how to become a big frog!

For more information on finding those profitable niches get a copy of Teri Champigny’s ‘Finding Profitable Niches‘ ebook.