Finding Your Niche-Research

Finding Your Niche-Market Research

Once you feel you have found your niche area (see find your niche) you need to do some basic research before you go out and start building your niche website. The research involves analysing the supply and demand for the choosen niche/theme.

Demand and Supply Research

If you want visitors you need to match what you offer to what they want. The key to this is in basing your website and web pages around carefully chosen Keywords. Keywords are crucial to your website for more information about keywords see the keyword tips and keyword research articles.

Demand and supply keyword research is simply a matter of looking to see if people are searching for and then looking at how many websites cater for that demand.

There are a number of tools available for researching keyword demand for your Website theme. The main tool is Overture keyword suggestion tool which you can access directly or via other keyword research tools like Good Keywords (recommended download).

To illustrate the process; imagine we are interested in making Websites and want to make a Website based on making Websites . Go to the Overture Website and enter making Website. Overture returns with a list of keyword based on Website making along with the number of times they were searched. (see below)

niche website research-1

If we look at the above list we see that "making your own website" is in relatively high demand (1312). We need now to look at the supply. We now go to Google, Altavista or Yahoo it doesn't matter which as long as you are consistent and do a search on "making your own website"- with the quotes.

niche website research-2

Now we have the supply 610.

The results are Overture 1312 and Altavista 610.Now calculate the demand supply ratio by dividing the results and multiplying by 10 as follows:

demand supply ratio=1312/610 *10=21.5

Ok what does this mean?

Basically we have good demand (1312) and low supply (610). It should not be a problem getting noticed at the search engines for this Website theme. As a contrast we will do the same, but this time the Website theme is Website design.

The results are:
Overture 214303
Altavista 1,576,064
Demand supply ratio=214303/1,576,064 *10=1.3

Here we have good demand (214303) but high supply (1,576,064). This one is probably not worth trying.

Rule of Thumb: If the ratio of demand/supply*10 >10 then we have a very good chance to get noticed for this Website theme. If it is below 5 then I personally would find something else. The higher the better. So if I were to do this analysis and one returns a ratio of 40 and the other 20 then go with the one of 40.

For those who decide to purchase the Site Build-it web package the site-build-it brainstorming tool does the above calculation and keyword research automatically and is discussed on the Using the Site build-it Brainstorming Tool page.

Choosing Your Website Niche

The best Theme/niche area will have

Excite you - You are going to be spending a lot of time on it -enjoy it!
Strong demand -plenty of people searching

Display plenty of opportunities for niche related keywords -lots of keyword combinations.

The site Niche website Guide covers in detail the process of choosing and building a niche website.

Caution: Do not be in a hurry to start building your website! There is nothing worse than starting a project only to find 3 months later that it's not what you want or that it is too difficult an area to compete in. Remember do the research and choose carefully.

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