Continued from previous post Why Passion Isn’t Enough in Business

There are two methods to locate the hot spots in Internet marketing topics: brainstorming them or researching them. Brainstorming is not a bad idea, but if you use it, you should also research and analyse your ideas to make sure they are viable.

Brainstorming

Here, you want to start engaging your creativity to find hot spots that you are passionate about that might have some potential to be great niches. One way to start is to just start trying to look at things from the point of view of a consumer. What are the burning issues consumers are trying to solve? These are the things they will be searching online to resolve.

For instance, you can use your own experience to generate some potential questions consumers might have, like:

1. Have I invested my savings wisely?
2. How do I stop a foreclosure?
3. How can I lose weight quickly?
4. Do I need to be on antidepressants?
5. What area in the country has the best job prospects?

Now you begin to see that when people are faced with a question they want an answer to, they aren’t going to search for the question, they will actually search for the solution! If you are the marketer, you may be thinking that they will look up weight or foreclosure problems, in actuality, they will be looking for solutions. So, they might type into a search engine:

1. Where to invest money in 2008
2. Foreclosure solutions
3. Weight loss programs
4. Medical advice on depression
5. Job markets in the United States

So, when you are brainstorming keywords or phrases, you can start with a basic question that might be being asked, but always try to find the way it might be searched to by using words like cure, solution, program, and so on.

Researching Your Chosen Topics

The next method uses the Google Keyword Tool, or something similar (like Overture) that can help you identify 1) other associated keywords or phrase to your niche, and 2) how hot the niche really is.

This tool will help you measure the three of the four criteria that keyword or phrase should meet to see if it is worth developing into a full-blown niche. It is located here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal .

Once you have a good idea of some potential keywords or phrases you want to research, you just go to the tool, and insert it. It will then generate a list of words or phrases, along with the advertising competition and the monthly approximate search volume for them, for the current month. To see how much the keyword is worth by CPC, you click the drop-down list which states “Show/hide columns.” Then, choose the option to show the estimated average CPC.

This will give you an idea of how competitive and how profitable the keyword or phrases you have brainstormed might be, and also how valuable to you as an Internet marketer the niche might be. Keep doing this for all the keywords or phrases, and try to find some that aren’t as competitive, have a high CPC and high search volume (demand).

You can even take keyword phrases generated by the tool and plug those in to see if it comes up with different keyword phrases that are better choices. As you do this process, it will help you to define your target niche better and also give you more ideas on some niches you may start to recognise as you go along this process.

How Hot Is It?

When you have some good choices, you will have a list of choices to investigate further. You still want to check to see if advertisers are interested in doing affiliate marketing offers. You will want to consider other environmental factors that might contribute to it’s “hot” factor. You’ll want to know how many people are talking about this topic. Is it too controversial to handle? It’s not just the Google Keyword analysis that will determine whether this the “hot” topic is a good topic to develop more. You will want to see what else you can find out about this topic to determine if you want to pursue it.

For instance, in terms of how many people are talking about it or whether affiliate marketers are interested in it, you will have to do a little further snooping. You can go to your affiliate bank programs, that you’ve already signed up as a publisher, and find out what affiliates offers are available that might match the niche. Some of these sites are www.clickbank.com or www.cj.com. After you log in, try to find what offers you might be able to put up on your web pages should you decide to target that niche. If you find very few, that this is an indication that advertisers are not that interested in this niche.

Another way to find out who is interested and how much it is being talked about, is to enter the keyword phrase into Google and see how many search results come up. If it is highly competitive, you will get too many results. If there is little interest, you will only get a few results. This will help you determine whether you have either too broad or too narrow a topic to generate the kind of interest you need to make money with it.

Other Factors To Consider

Let’s face it, current events are big news, but they are also highly transitory. The hot topics of the day may reach a Category 5 storm one day and be non-existent on the radar screen the next day. So, even though some topics are hot, intensely hot, that doesn’t mean they have staying power. If you want to ride a wave, then it’s okay to use them, just be aware that this is the case.

Here a few more factors to consider as you research your niche to decide if it is going to be a good one to do:

• Intensity
  How much interest is there worldwide? Is it an event of major impact all over the world or regionally? Is it relevant to some current event that is high on people’s minds for now?

• Duration
  This is the lifespan of that particular hot topic. Maybe, like the Olympics, it’s a high intensity event with a very short duration. In that case, you either need to plan ahead to get out after a bit, or to market much earlier than the actual event, to maximise sales.

• Spin-offs
  Even if the hot spot is short duration, but high intensity, is it possible it is going to evolve into another area of major interest? In that case, you might want to plan ahead for the potential spin-offs in topic themes that can occur.

Continued in the article Researching Internet Marketing Hot Spots

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