Finding a niche is all about looking for keywords that has not been discovered or exploited yet. Easier said than done. One of the best articles I have seen about this process is at Yaro’s site. He provides a pretty good description of the entire, process but also a good description of finding niches.

Most of the articles I have read talk about using Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool as the basis for keyword research. It does provide you with interesting data but the whole issue of comparison jumped out at me as a major issue to overcome. How would I compare all these keywords and number of times they were searched to pick an good niche. I new I had to dig a bit deeper.

I quickly realized through my research that there were a few tools that I need to set up before I could be really effective at identifying good niche keywords. These tools are assisting me with researching keywords and putting together some statistics so that I could make the comparison. These are the tools that I set used:

1. Good Keywords: Good Keywords is a software program that provides a link to Overture’s data but presents keywords in a manner so that the user can drill down to specific combinations of keywords. I found it very useful in seeing a variety of combinations that had different search numbers.
2. Google: When I saw a keyword combination suggested by Good Keywords, I used Google to search on those keywords to see how many results came back.
3. Google AdWords:I used Google AdWords to get an estimate of the cost per click that particular keyword and keyword combinations were at.
4. Microsoft Excel: I used Excel to compile the data to make the analysis that much easier.

With these tools setup, I was now in a position to evaluate keywords and keyword combinations to find something that I could monetize. In Post 2 (Part II), I will get in to the step-by-step process that I used to choose a keyword combination to monetize.