The Wealth Gang

Having proper niche research tools at your disposal can not only allow you to make money fast online, but it can help you crush your competition. Without these essential Internet marketing tools, you are either just guessing or not paying any attention — in which case you can’t really call yourself a marketer.

Doing your homework ahead of time and preparing for success will save you a lot of wasted effort. I know because I was there. When I first attempted trying to make money on the Internet, the first thing I did was start a blog on a topic that I really enjoyed and knew a lot about. Every day, I added more content, spent way too much time crafting my blog posts, and waited… and waited.

I failed to do any niche research and simply assumed that since I had a big interest that other people must too. There’s only two problems with that:

1. Just because people are interested doesn’t mean there is money to be made
2. I didn’t do any keyword research to capture the minimal traffic that existed (nor did I even know what it was at the time)

There’s always the argument about how to build your online business… do you find a product to promote or service to sell first, or do you pick a niche and then fill it with products and advertising?

I’m a firm believer that you have to do your niche research first. Products come and go, advertising is up and down, but entire markets will always exist. If you pick the right category for your blog or website, there will be an endless amount of products and services to promote.

So how do you pick a niche?

It has to have at least the following qualifications for me to consider it:

1. Traffic: Is there an mass interest for this category and are they reachable online?
2. Competition: Competition is not a bad thing. It means it is a profitable area and there are opportunities to form partnerships
3. Products: Are there a lot of products and a wide range of different products and different price points
4. Buyers: Is the traffic full of free loaders or are they big spenders?

Here’s a hint… business owners and buyers for companies are big spenders. Things simply cost more in the business world, they’re used to spending money and capable of spending a lot of it.

One point about searching for products and wondering if they are buyers… Even if you don’t on selling products through your marketing, you still want a lot of product potential because that means there are a lot of advertisers and a lot of competition (making it more expensive to advertise online). If you’re not selling a product or service, then you’re running advertising on your site in order to produce revenue, and you want high competition there.

Okay, so on to the niche research tools I use.

Awareness: Have you ever bought a new car and then you suddenly realized how many people drive the same car? As a marketer, you need to develop an awareness of what is going on. Pay attention to what is constantly being advertised, what the media is talking about, etc. If you see a lot of it, it’s because something is working and some smart people are spending a lot of money on advertising.

Keyword Tracker: If you don’t have SEO Elite to do keyword research, then you’re stuck with a free keyword tool. That will work just fine, but you always have to test for accuracy. I can’t tell you the number of times I thought I found a gold mine, only to find out the free version was completely inaccurate. The free Keyword Tracker is not perfect, but it can give you a rough idea on search volume.

Google Trends: The trend is your friend, right? If you’re fast enough, you can easily get ahead of the competition and get your content on the top of Google for new trends. Think new albums, sporting events, and politics. Current events and trends can make you some serious money in a short amount of time, but realize that some trends can last a long time as well (such as a recession). Keep an eye on Google Trends to see what’s on most people’s mind.

eBay Pulse: This is a nice little niche research tool that will show you the most popular categories and products being purchased and/or searched for on eBay. Not a bad way to see what people are searching to spend their money on (hint hint).

Amazon: Same as above

About.com: Need some general ideas for broad topics and categories? Go to About.com and try to uncover some topics that are loaded with the most articles. This will help you brainstorm and see what areas About.com is benefiting from search traffic.

Yahoo Answers: If you’re looking for that hungry crowd that has problems they need resolved, there’s no better source than Yahoo Answers. Dig around to see what questions are being asked over and over again, and you might find a hidden gem of people eager to spend money online in order to get their issue resolved.

Put these tools to use and start making some money…

If keyword research is the key to bringing in massive profits online and driving traffic, then what are the best tools to use? There are a lot of options, both free and paid, all with their limitations. Some are clunky, some are just outright inaccurate, while others are just outright useless.

From my experience, the free I ones that I would use are:

• Google Keyword Tool
• Free WordTracker

When you’re ready to invest your profits back into your business and use what professional SEO consultants use, then you’ll want to take a look at SEO Elite. I recommend starting with the free tools, as they will give you enough information to start, but as your income and experience expands and you’re ready to ramp up your profits — get SEO Elite.

If you want free traffic, then you need to get as many web pages ranked in Google as you possibly can. You want to control the virtual real estate so when someone searches for “dog training,” every one of those search results on the first page belong to you. You can do that with this too. It’s a multi-use piece of software that not only allows you to get your sites ranked, but you can spy on your competitors to see exactly what they are doing to earn their top positions. Then you can mimic what they’re doing to beat them at their own game.

In fact, someone thought this software was so great, they created this hilarious video! Warning, it’s kind of loud, so turn down your speakers…

=>> More About SEO Elite

When it comes to making money online, your success boils down to one thing: Traffic. The more targeted traffic you have, the more money you will make. Regardless if your Internet marketing strategy is by blogging, video marketing or PPC, finding the  most profitable keywords is the critical component to getting loads of traffic that converts into cash in your pocket.

Because we’ve been talking about free methods to drive traffic to your website or blog, let’s cover exactly how to do that…

We already outlined the basic principles for doing keyword research and finding keywords with high search volume. Remember that your goal when it comes to getting search engine traffic is to not only find the keywords or phrases with high search volume, but to find that sweet spot where you can dominate the search engines.

Generally speaking, the more competition there is for a particular keyword, the harder it will be to get that #1 spot in Google. The less competition, the easier it will be. The sweet spot is finding the keyword that will generate the most traffic, whether it be the #1 spot for a medium search volume keyword or the 20th spot for an incredibly high search volume keyword… or both.

Let’s clarify what we mean by competition.

When trying to figure out your competition and how easy it will be to get your page ranked in Google, there are two things to consider:

1. The actual volume of competition, or how many competing pages exists
2. The strength of the competition, or the Page Rank of those listings in the top 10 spots of Google

The lower the volume of competition, the easier it will be — in general. But, even if there is not a lot of competition, but the pages listed in the top 10 search results have a high Page Rank, you need to out rank them. Page Rank is essentially the score that Google gives to a website to decide what should be listed where in their search engine. That’s a whole other topic, but basically the more PR your competition has, the harder it will be to overtake their position.

The easiest way to check PR… download and install the Google Toolbar.

As for finding your competition and how many people you are competing against… that’s easy. Just type your keyword into a Google search. This will show you the results for that keyword search and how many competing pages there are. Some people like to put “quotes” around their keyword search so they can get exact results.

In this case, the search results for “keyword research” returned 10.5 million competing pages when using “quotes” around the keyword. That’s A LOT of competition. A rule of thumb is to find keywords in the 30,000 or less range. If you can find less than 3,000 competing pages, you’re golden.

Once you have your results, click the links on the first page to see what kind of PR your competitors have. The more established websites that have proper on-page and off-page SEO will be tough to beat, but there are many topic areas and keywords that you can target where the top search results have not been poperly optimized.