Get On The Cutting Edge Of Your Niche
[private].[/private]The big money in most niches lies on the cutting edge of that niche. When you jump ahead to the cutting edge of a niche, you play upon the “instant” gratification urge that most of us have. People don’t want to wait for the latest and greatest news regarding their interest area to become common knowledge. People want that latest information and they want it yesterday, and many of them are even willing to pay for it if you present it in a nice package.
In order to take our niche research to the next level and jump out ahead of the pack we’re going to visit Google News:
I used our example one more time and searched Google news for “cat grooming”. To my surprise, one of the news articles on the very first page was from a business website talking about the projected growth of the market for eco-friendly pet products, to include dog and cat grooming supplies.
Perhaps I have stumbled upon something here and should go back and change our “cat grooming” example to something else so I can get into this niche on my own (just kidding of course).
There were over 130 results for “cat grooming” in Google News at the time of my search:
When you take a close gander at the news results combined with the other suggestions I have made so far in the “Picking A Niche” section, you’ll see there is not much left to chance. Research is key in creating the ultimate information product.
Using these free resources that are sitting at your fingertips by simply visiting Google, you will be well prepared to do some very thorough in depth research. However, there is still more useful stuff we haven’t discussed yet in regards to niche research with Google…
Using Google Blogsearch For Niche Research
Google Blogsearch is the final tool that I’m going to cover regarding niche research with Google. Using Blogsearch, you can browse all of the most popular blogs on the internet where writers that are already savvy with your niche talk about that latest developments and happenings.
Use Blogsearch to locate a few of the more popular figures in your niche and take some time to see what they are writing about. Using Blogsearch alone you should be able to gather plenty of inspiration for an information product based on the types of posts and comments on popular niche blogs.
Here is a link to check out Blogsearch and give it a try:
Once you enter in the blogsearch keywords for your desired niche, you will get results that look like this:
Combining Google With Alexa
Once you begin to find informative sites on your niche, take a few minutes to not only research the niche content, but also the sites themselves. More specifically, head over to Alexa anytime you see a site targeted to your potential niche and check out these useful tidbits from Alexa:
** Traffic Rankings
** The “Site Info”
** Sites linking in
** Visitors who visited this site also visited:
These four useful tools that Alexa provides can tell you a lot more about potential competitors including how much traffic they are getting, the amount of time they have been online, who they are partnered with (sites linking in), and related sites for you to check out.
Alexa is a fantastic resource for “casing” related sites in your niche:
Many marketers argue back and forth that Alexa traffic rankings are inaccurate, but I have yet to see a solution that proves to be better than Alexa. In fact, I enjoy the information provided by Alexa so much that I have actually installed a special “Marketer’s Toolbar” on my web browser so that every site I visit tells me a little bit more information regarding Google Pagerank and Alexa Traffic Rank. Plus, with just a few clicks on the toolbar I can instantly get detailed reports on the sites I visit that include keyword density and more!
I suggest you get this toolbar for situations just like this, when you are doing niche research and “casing” some of your potential competitors.
This Marketer’s Toolbar is Super Duper Handy:
http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/
