Niche Market Research

How Can I Tell if A Market is Worth Getting Into?

All too often I hear horror stories about how after many months of costly product research and creation, an eager entrepreneur sets up shop, spends another yacht load of cash SEOing the web site then, a dingy load of cash for an expert copywriter, only to find when launch day arrives, no one will buy the product. At which point our unwitting entrepreneur is pretty much sunk, pure and simple. The worst part of all, in that situation, the person frequently has no idea why they have failed. The facts of the matter are, our captain of modern industry wound up pitching a tent in Antarctica and ended up adrift on an iceberg headed for the equator!

Kudos for diligence to our entrepreneurial bastion of endurance. Managing a product from conception to market is no small feat and should in no way be underestimated. Unfortunately, many small businesses, at the outset of their world changing conception, overlook the single most important issue surrounding their initiative. Proof of concept or, more to the point, will your product sell? The process, in a nut shell should go something like this;

1. You have a great idea
2. You do keyword research
3. You set up a ‘quicky’ web site
4. You launch a PPC campaign

Now that you have an overview of the process, whats most important here is the keyword research. Below is a list of some great resources I like to use.

• Google’s Zeitgeist, pronounced ‘zit-gist’ (a German word meaning general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era) shows weekly, monthly, and annual trends and patterns based on the countless millions of queries conducted through Google.

• Google Trends is an excellent tool that lets you compare the world’s interest to your chosen niche markets. Entering up to five topics, you may see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. The result also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions.

• Magazines.com lists their 10 Top Titles on their homepage. These include publications such as Sports Illustrated, For Kids, Time, People, InStyle, Woman’s Day, Money, Newsweek, Women’s Health and Disney Adventures. Any of these topics are hot ones.

• eBay Pulse is a daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks, and cool stuff on eBay, listing it’s popular searches, largest stores and most watched items. You can also use the drop-down menu to filter the lists to show content for more specific categories.

• Yahoo’s Buzz Index focuses on the entertainment industry, providing their most popular daily searches for actors, movies, music, sports, TV and video games.

• comScore Networks provides insight into consumer behavior and attitudes by compiling reports based on a global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given comScore explicit permission to capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.

• JupiterResearch provides research, analysis and advice to help guide technology vendors and service providers on market opportunity. Guest access is available, however, to quickly gain access to salient sections of recent Jupiter Research reports, try Googling “jupiter research ____” with the subject of you inquiry.

• Google Insights for Search allows you to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames as well as narrow data to specific categories, like finance, health, and sports so you can anticipate demand for your business helping you to budget and plan accordingly and know where to find your customers by seeing how search volume is distributed across regions and cities.

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool is another free tool that reports on search performance and seasonal trends on keywords and keyword phrases that you enter into the search box. Statistics show the relative amount of users searching for that keyword on Google.

• WordTracker shows you exactly what people are looking for online by showing you exactly which keywords and phrases they’re searching for. Wordtracker’s suggestions are based on over 330 million keywords and phrases that a sampling of people across multiple engines have used over the previous 90 days.

Now we are lrft with PPC. What is PPC you ask? Pay Per Click advertising. You know, those little ads on the right site of your web browser. What you need to do is blow some of that seed money on advertising before you spend a dime on development. After all, wouldn’t you like to know you have no chance of making money after spending only $250 instead of $25,000? More importantly, throwing a few hundred or a thousand dollars at proof of concept will save you the one thing that can never be replaced, YOUR TIME!

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