When you do business online, you have to understand that you have access to thousands of different markets and you can choose any of them. Therefore it’s never a good idea to keep beating a dead horse, when there’s plenty of others. If you get stuck in your business – move on.

Having that in mind, it would be good if you could choose a good niche from the beginning. That’s what Niche Socializer training starts with and I will show you how it’s done.

One thing you should always consider first is what you like to do or what you already do. You can start in the market you already in and look for those sub-niches that are worth conquering.

If you don’t have any ideas to begin with, start brainstorming. Go to Amazon, Ebay Pulse, look what is popular. Look at Google Trends. If you’re a member of any social networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) see which groups get most attention. Finally, pay attention to everything around you, look for niches offline, see what sells in the shops. Try to create as big list of ideas as possible.

Once you have that list, you can dig deeper. This is where the keyword research begins. And to begin to research keywords, I always start with Google itself. Start typing your idea in the search field in Google and see what suggestions it gives.

Type down those suggestions that you think you can use. In this example, all of them are good to use, except maybe ‘slippers uk’, unless of course you are doing a local business.

Another place to get more keyword suggestions is to complete the search for your root keyword and look at the bottom of results in Google. There are also keyword research tools that you can also use, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll only cover what Google provides and that’s a fair amount of tools.

Next thing you want to do is find out how much traffic each of those keywords get. To do that, let’s use Google External Tool, where we’ll look up each keyword from the first step.

In some cases the Keyword Tool will give you good keyword suggestions as well. But keep in mind that you want to see as much traffic as possible, in this case of “slippers for women”, we can expect 18,100 searches per month, or 603 searches per day. That doesn’t mean that you will get all of those visits to your site. If you managed to get your site to #1 in search results for this keyword, you’d get approximately under 300 visits per day. That’s a good number, normally I would look for at least 300 searches a day (that means 9,000 and more in the Keyword Tool).

Repeat the process for all of your keywords and write down the traffic estimates.

Next we’ll see which keywords are realistic to compete for. For that we go back to Google and search for each of our keywords in quotes (phrase match).

Two things to look for here, the number of result pages (93,900 in this case) and the ads. If you see any ads for the keyword, that’s a good sign and it means that there’s a commercial intent in those searches for this keyword. The result pages is the main factor to decide if you want to compete for this keyword and anything under 150,000-100,000 means you can compete pretty easily. The less pages you see, the less competition there is and the easier it is to get your traffic. In this case 93,900 competing pages is a pretty good number.

But that’s not all. We want to also see if there’s any chance for us to get on page one. To see that, let’s search for our keyword again only this time without the quotes, as our target searchers would. There are few things to look for here:

1. How many results have the keyword in the title? You want to see at least one that hasn’t got it, the less the better. In case of “slippers for women” there are only 2 that have the full keyword – that’s a good sign.
2. How many back-links each page has. To find out this you will have to search for each result page in Yahoo (I’ll explain why) in the following format (changing the url and the domain name respectively): link:http://www.example.com/result-page.htm -site:example.com
   
3. The PR of each site of the results. To do that, install the Google Toolbar, if you haven’t yet and go to the home page of each site (note, the homepage, not the page from search results, unless it’s one and the same). You want to see at least 2-3 sites that have a PR of 3 or less.

Note that you have to use Yahoo to look up the number of back-links, beacause Google gives little information about it. Also, all this information can be retrieved faster if you use FireFox and the free SEO for FireFox extension. I recommend using that to save a lot of time.

Once you have all that information, you can decide whether to compete to rank in Google for this keyword or to move on. If the keyword meets all criteria above, you should get to page one easily. For example, “slippers for women” that I used meets all criteria perfectly and therefore is a very good keyword to work with. Which is quite surprising, because I didn’t prepare it before writing this post and discovered it on the fly. Just shows that there are thousands of niches and probably millions of keywords that are literally gold mines.

That’s it for the first post in the series, hope it helps. I’m pretty sure that these same guidelines will be used in Niche Socializer only of course in much more detail. They are pretty standard and work every time. The important thing is to know what kind of audience you want to target from the start, and look for those keywords that these people would type into Google.