Niche Market Research Basics For Your Free Blog

Choosing the right market for your blog is, hands down, the most important factor in determining your success.

I've heard of choosing your market or niche as being compared to a fight; if you got to choose your opponent, would you take a martial arts master or a 98 pound weakling?  When you're researching and deciding on a niche market for your blog, it's kind of the same idea.  You want to find one where you have a chance - not where you're competing against big boys.  The good news is that if you know what you're doing, finding a target market isn't that hard.

The first step is narrowing down your target market.  Almost everyone starts with too broad of an idea. Let's take the 'Dog Training' idea as an example.  Success might be possible in a huge market like this, but you would be making things much harder on yourself that you need to.

Dog training for big dogs would be better.  Even better would be dog training for Great Danes.

The next step is to research the 'need' for that market.  One of the easiest ways to do this is to use the Google external keyword tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Let's take the dog training for Great Danes example: We go ahead and enter that keyword into the search box, and get about 200 results.

I would want to narrow things down more and see how many people were searching for great dane training on a monthly basis, do more searches for related keywords, etc.

Another tool I frequently use to do keyword research is the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool at Wordtracker:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

If I can find a 'theme', a niche, based around a series of long-tail keywords that have a good amount of monthly searches, if those keywords don't have a lot of competition, and they're relevant to a market that's willing to spend money, I've found a solid niche.

Make sure to do a regular Google search for these keywords and see what kind of sites come up.  Are they relatively new, web 2.0 - property-type of sites?  Or are they established, high-powered sites with heaps of content?

Also, take a look at advertiser competition.  If people are paying for advertising for a niche, that generally means that it's one that can be monetized.  If not, you might want to find a new niche.

So that gives you the basics of niche market research for your blog.  This is obviously a general overview - here are two resources I recommend to help you research and choose the right target niche:

Micro Niche Finder - An awesome keyword research software that makes this whole process so much easier.  Does almost everything we talked about in this post for you.  Will make you your money back pretty darn fast. Highly recommended.

The Mini Money Making Blog Blueprint - The entire system I use to create niche blogs just like these that earn $200, $300, $500 a month and more on autopilot!