eBusinessmap

A niche is something that has good demand (a lot of people are searching for it) and not very much supply (competition). There are literally hundreds of niches online. These exist because large companies are too busy fighting for highly competitive keywords and don’t have time to chase small fish. Small fish to them are big fish for single entrepreneurs. To be a true niche there must be good demand and little competition.

Brainstorming
If you haven’t got a list of keywords these tools will help you brainstorm:
Digital Point Suggestion Tool
Nichebot Classic

After you have a good list of keywords you’ll need to find the demand (how many people are looking for it).

Finding Keyword Demand
I use the following tools to find demand:

Overture Keyword Selector
Based on Yahoo! searches. Verb tenses, misspellings, singular and plural
forms are all combined.

Google Trends (www.google.com/trends)
Graphed Google search trends.

Example
Nintendo and Playstation example


The same time Nintendo has seen a big spike in searches Playstation has seen a sharp decline.

Finding Keyword Supply
The next part of the equation is supply. These are how many other people or companies compete for your keywords. There’s some debate on how to pin down supply but these two links will give you a good landscape of your competition. The McDar tool will give you “the recipe” for what it takes to be number one with a keyword.

To find supply I like:
Google Suggest (labs.google.com/suggest)
As you type, Google provides the top 10 most popular keywords that begin with the keyed-in letters, in order of popularity.

McDar’s Keyword Tool
Type in the keyword phrase you want and the tool will tell you the small things that you need to do to rank.

SEOlogs Keyword difficulty tool
This tool gives a snapshot on the difficulty of certain keywords. It might not be abosute but the feedback will give you a good idea about the keywords you are selecting.

Brainstorming, Demand, & Supply (all in one)
For an all inclusive tool I like to use Word Tracker’s Free Trial

Which keywords are best?
As you carve out your niche you’ll wonder what type of keywords should you try to compete for. Are the easy keywords (with little traffic) the best or are the high traffic highly competitive keywords the approach to take? The answer is to pick both hard and easy keywords if your plan on starting many sites. There are two advantages to this approach. One you lower your risk. Two time is on your side.

If you are starting one or two sites it would be better to target all the keywords from the begining. If you’ve never had an ebusiness before you might consider targeting easier words first. That way you’ll see results quicker.

Best of Luck,

Matthew Ryan