Missed the second part in the series? You can access it here: Does Your Niche Have Potential?

Another great tool for researching your niche is Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends).

There’s lots of useful information here. You can see that the news volume is synced with the search volume, and several notable news articles are displayed, along with where they occurred on the timeline.

In the lower section, you can see which countries, cities, and languages made the most searches. Be aware that the indicators are normalized, meaning they are adjusted for that region’s population. For example, South Africa has about 44 million people, compared with the U.S.’s 295 million. So the U.S. may have performed more actual searches, but after the adjustment is made, South Africa comes on top for this search term, which is “fly fishing.”

In the upper-right corner of the page, you can switch regions (e.g. if you wanted to check the U.S. only), and you can change the time period.

For example, notice below how we’ve changed the time period to a single month. See any cyclic trends there?

You may have noticed that searches for this topic tend to spike every Friday, going into the weekend, and then fall again during the week.

This information may be useful if you are going to advertise with Google Adwords, and you’re launching a firesale or other limited time campaign, because you’ll want to schedule your campaign around one or more of those spikes.

Some markets have different patterns, so it’s useful to be aware of them prior to launch.

Another great use for Google Trends is if you are trying to decide between two different niches. If you enter your search terms and separate two or more with a comma, Google will compare them for you.

Very useful.

The work is already done for you. You just need to put it to good use. As you can see above, piano is too broad a niche. It has a high amount of searches, but the bids for PPC traffic is too low. As a result, you would suspect that people are generally not making a lot of money with that search term.

Remember, high volume + low PPC bids = low click through rates and even lower conversions.

Fly fishing, on the other hand, does have PPC bids between 30 cents and $2.00, so money is likely being made there. However, the search term itself is too low. Unless you have other keywords for that niche to add additional traffic, you should probably steer clear from there as well.

There are several other sites you can use as well to get niche ideas, and especially to narrow the niche and discover potential information the market wants:

• Nichebot – http://www.nichebot.com
• Shopping.com Top Searches – http://www2.shopping.com/top_searches
• AOL Hot Searches – http://hot.aol.com/hot/hot
• Google Groups – http://groups.google.com
• Craig’s List – http://www.craigslist.com
• Delicious Popular – http://del.icio.us/popular
• Digg – http://www.digg.com
• Google Catalogs – http://catalogs.google.com
• Technorati – http://www.technorati.com

Also, you should do several targeted searches in both Google and Yahoo (for example, on the subject of “hobbies”).

Finally, you can see what existing digital products are being sold in your target niche at the Clickbank Marketplace (http://marketplace.clickbank.net).

HINT: If you want to see how your competitor’s sale pages have evolved over time, the Wayback Machine is a great place to do so (http://www.archive.org).

And of course you should always Google your keywords and check out the competition in the Adwords ads. In this case pay special attention to the ads that sell information products (or services like yours if you’re selling a service).

By now you should have a good idea of the market you will target, so check back soon for the next part in the series to learn how to find out more about what other’s are selling and the best ways to test your niche’s money making potential before launching a new product.

Internal related posts:

1. Complete Your Niche Research…
2. Does Your Niche Have Potential?

Tagged as: internet marketing, niche marketing