As somebody completely new to niche marketing, I did my homework on what tools to use to help me research potentially profitable niches. Before long I was using the tools at Seobook and Nichebot, both of which draw information and data from Wordtracker.
After digging around a little and playing with some words and phrases I came across what looked like a long tail keyphrase with fantastic potential … almost 600 searches a day and only 150 other competitors using this keyphrase in their title. I was very excited.
Within two days I had an information product ready to go for this niche, a great sales page AND I was dominating page one of Google for my keyphrase within a day. (Read how I achieved these top google rankings ). All I had to do now was sit back, wait for the flood of visitors and watch my paypal account explode.
Not quite the way it went. The graph below shows the actual traffic I began to recieve from my page one goolge rankings for this very specific niche. As you can see, the figures are nowhere near the 584 daily estimate predicted by Wordtraker. The most interesting part is that none of these searches were an ‘exact’ keyphrase match, which means I have yet to see a single search result for the keyphrase that Wordtracker predicted was typed into Google or Yahoo almost 600 times a day! When you consider that I own eight of the top ten spots on page one of google for this keyphrase, it is even more remarkalbe.
Being new to niche research techniques, I was confused and disappointed with the results. I thought I was on the brink of my first highly profitable product. So far I have made two sales, which is a milestone for me as I have earned my first $94 in passive income. But imagine how much bigger these figures could be if the Wordtracker figures that lead me into this niche were as high as Wordtracker predicted them to be.
So I was interested to know more about what went wrong. I went to the Google Keyword tool. I realized that I should have done this first but hey I’m new and I make mistakes! Guess what? For the same keyphrase that Wordtracker estimated almost 414 daily Google searches for, Google didn’t have search data.
So what now? Given that I want to continue in niche marketing, I would really like to know how I can accuarately find profitable niches. I don’t have much respect for Wordtracker after this experience but I am thinking that because I am rather inexperienced, perhaps I’m missing something and somebody with far more experience can shed light on my errors.
In the meantime I’m just about to being a ‘reverse’ experiment on this. I have found a second very specific keyphrase for this niche for which Wordtracker estimates only 150 per month (5 per day) while the Google keyword tool shows 1600 searches per month (approx 53 per day). I plan to use the same techniqes I used to dominate Google for the first keypharse with this one too. All going well and assuming I manage to achieve the rankings, I will post the results here on the blog in a couple of weeks!
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting blog post. What would you say was the most important marketing factor?
What I’ve found to be most effective in niche marketing is to take a large pool of terms with as many permutations as possible and running these as a batch through the major search popularity tools (WordTracker, WordPot, AdWords Suggest) and, instead of using these returned results for their absolute value, consider only the relative value for each. Of course, you still need to consider the competition factor (which, if you use the allintitle:”SEARCH TERM” operator for the total count in Google, you will get a much more accurate number).
Calculate the average KEI from popularity (you may have to add a weight value for each popularity source), and whatever has the highest KEI….there’s your niche.
Moral of the story: You can’t trust absolute numbers or make estimates from these, but relative numbers are all you need to pick the right terms.
I also built a site around a keyword wordtracker said 187 hits a day.I rank number 1 for the term site de forex and it doisn’t get any traffic.Wordtracker sucks
Oh yes i forgot to mention that i have several other sites that i have used wordtracker for and similar results occured maybe now i will try somehting else.But I guess if someone knows a better way they are keeping it secret because i have searched everywhere thats how i found this site cool siteby the way.