Now that you have your niche topic master list, you’re going to start looking at search popularity for the main keywords in the topics you’ve chosen.
Much has been written about keyword analysis – and many complicated and expensive programs profess to tell you how to do it “properly”.
Our advice is to use the results from keyword analysis as one piece of the jigsaw puzzle that tells you whether you’ve got the right niche. It’s a very important part, for sure, since it tells you what real people are searching for on the web right now and how many other web publishers out there are attempting to give it to them.
But it’s not the Holy Grail of web marketing, or even of niche research.
At ASC when we research niches we do a whole lot more than just focus on the numbers. If you follow our lead you’re going to be way ahead of most other web publishers out there in terms of the quality of your niche research.
Today we’re focusing on the popularity of your chosen niche topics – based on how many searches are done each month.
This data is vital for the success of your business. If you don’t have enough people searching for what you offer, you are unlikely to make money from the niche.
It’s not impossible – because what you write can become the product, and your product can stimulate the demand. Blogger Steve Pavlina gets 1,000,000 visitors a month to his personal development blog - yet searches for his main keyword, “personal development” only amount to around 18,000 a month.
By writing passionately about what he believes in, Steve has created his own product and produced a huge market for it.
Numbers are never the whole story, but they are a great starting point.
Take each of the topics on your master list and get the total number of searches done on the main keyword for the topic in the last month.
You’re looking for 75,000-100,000 searches on your top keyword for the niche. If your top niche keyword doesn’t have this then it’s unlikely to be big enough for an authority site – or to return the kind of income you want for the effort you are putting in.
You need to know more about your niche than just how many people search on the main keyword. You need to look deeper at the results. For any keyword with more than 75,000 searches you need to find the sub-niches.
Now search for associated keyword phrases for the main keyword you entered. These search phrases are your sub-niches. They can become sub-domains, categories or article topics depending on the size of your niche and the way you structure your site eventually.
Ideally you are looking for a minimum of 10,000 searches a month on these sub-niches – especially if you want to create additional mini sites or sub-domains of the main domain.
Note down the number of sub-niches the main niche supports on your list or spreadsheet against the 75,000+ keywords only.
Now you can rank your topic master list again based on main keyword popularity - easy if you have it on a spreadsheet. The picture you get may look a little different from what you started with. You should be getting a much clearer picture of which niches from your original list are worth more research and development time.