Article in General Business

An important aspect of building your next web venture is the niche where you will be setting up shop. The ideal market to be offering products or services in is one where what you are offering is obviously in demand, has a good profitability and has the least amount of competition as possible. You especially want to avoid markets that are oversaturated, but how do you find those niche markets in the online world?

I want to first point out that it is not always necessary to avoid the oversaturated market completely, however, you had better know your stuff if you decide to compete in these areas. It’s best to proceed into territory such as this only if you are an expert in that specific field. Sometimes a very knowledgeable person can offer a new twist in the midst of the same old thing. But this isn’t a place for beginners.

There are a few very easy ways to identify a niche that has a lot of competition. First we want to use a keyword tool to see how many searches are garnered every month for the market we’re looking at. Go over to www.KeywordDiscovery.com/search.html and look for your term. We’ll use the keyword phrase “work from home”, not only because I already know it’s an oversaturated market, but because it provides a good example. This term gets more than 259,000 searches per month, indicating that it is extremely popular. The next step is to go over to Google and search for that term without using quotes and look at the number of ads people are paying for.

On the right hand side of Google’s organic search results, at the bottom of the ads you will see a link that says, “More Sponsored Links”. This link will take you to a page that has nothing but 10 ads on it and the number of the page of listings you are on. Keep clicking the next button until the Next link goes away. You might get the picture after the first 10 or so pages of ads, but just for kicks, I clicked to the last page for the term “work from home” and came to 93 before it got to the end. With 10 ads on every page, that means there are approximately 930 paid ads for the keyword term in question.

If that’s not enough to convince you this is a very saturated market, this time search for “work from home” with the quotes and well look at something different. It’s important to use quotes because we want to find the exact term, in that order, and see how many pages it appears on. This keyword phrase appears on more than 23 million pages indicating there are millions of web sites vying for a piece of the same pie you are thinking about competing in. How does that make you feel about treading into these waters?

Of course there are thousands of different variations to the work from home industry and thousands of different keyword terms to scan through. You may be able to offer a different perspective and find a smaller niche within this larger niche, but chances are, unless you are going to be extremely unique in this field, this is one better left to the people already fighting over it.

Whatever niche you are thinking of getting into, it is best to first explore the competition and see what you’re up against. This way you can either look for a less busy sub-niche or just decide to go into a completely different arena and stand a much better chance of success.