Used Bikes : A real example of niche research

Warning: This post is a comparatively new one. However make sure to read it as I share a step by step method of finding profitable niche (used bikes) with a real example. This is my most successful strategy through which I have been making good amount of money.

Niche sites are a great and popular way to earn some really good passive income. The most critical part is the process of identifying the niche. There is no dearth of sites that talk about the concepts in a theoretical manner. However most of these sites do not share the real niche sites from which they have been making money for the fear of attracting competition. In this post I am going to share a niche site about used bikes for sale that I am starting to work upon and most importantly I shall share the exact process of how I zeroed down to this particular niche.

In this post I shall talk about

1. Requirements of a good niche
2. Identifying the broad industry
3. How to find out potential niches inside the broad industry
4. Competition analysis
5. Identifying the income potential
6. Selecting the niche to work upon
7. Designing a niche site
8. Preparing for niche domination

Requirements of a good niche

A good niche should have

1. Good amount of traffic potential: I avoid niches that have less than 30,000 monthly searches
2. Good number of long tail words: The searches should be split among several keywords and not concentrated in 1 or 2 keywords
3. Not too strong competition: Avoid niches where least pagerank among the page1 results is 4 or more
4. High earning potential

If you look at the above 4 criteria, I am basically looking for a niche that has high search traffic that I can get easily and the traffic can be converted into good amount of money. If you ignore any of these points then you will not get adequate earnings from the niche.

Identifying the broad industry (Used Goods)

There are enough profitable niches inside any industry you choose. Contrary to what many MMO Gurus advise, I will ask you to select the broad industry based on your personal view and your day to day experience. Personally I have a strong belief that used goods market in India will move online in a big way as it will help both the buyer and the seller to get better deal by removing the middle man. The seed word will be derived from this industry selection. For my example the seed words are used and second hand. If you select another industry like technology you will start with several seed words like windows, linux, twiiter, mac etc.

How to find out potential niches inside the broad industry

I have selected my industry as used goods. Used goods is too broad for my comfort. Now I want to figure out the niches inside the industry. For this I shall be using google adwords keyword tool. In the adword tool, I type used and hit the button Get Keyword ideas. Next I enable the ’show local search volume column’ and sort the results by local search volume as I intend to target the Indian market. The screenshot of the result can be seen below.

There are 3 important information in the screenshot above.

• The advertiser competition column shows the competition among adsense advertiser for the particular keyword. A simple glance will reveal that the competition level for most of the keywords is quite high and hence if I monetize my website about used bikes with adsense, I shall be getting good money per click.
• There are 2 columns for traffic. The local traffic numbers and global search numbers. Since I shall be targetting the Indian market, the local search volume is important for me. If you intend to build a website for international traffic, consider the global traffic number. Note: the local numbers are for the latest month i.e August whereas the global number is average for last 12 months. Hence it is a good idea to study the local search numbers for 10-12 important countries even if you intend to target the international market.

Looking at the above data it becomes evident that I need to focus on only 2 items to get a substantial % of traffic of the used goods market i.e used bikes and used cars. A similar analysis is done for the other seed word i.e second hand and I end up with another 3 target keywords i.e second hand cars, second hand bikes and second hand mobiles. It is a good idea to start with 5-6keywords having decent amount of traffic so that at the end of all the steps of analysis you will be left with at least 1-2 niches.

 Competition analysis

Now we know that there is a good amount of traffic for the keywords used cars and used bikes. However that information is of no use to us unless we can figure out if we can get a good % of that traffic i.e whether we can get into the top 5-6 results on Google or not. I have covered this topic in depth in my post Keyword difficulty analysis

The keyword difficulty analysis basically consists of finding out thetop 10 results for your target keyword and then finding out several important SEO parameters about these sites. A sample output of a simple keyword competition analysis will look something like this. The idea is to see if I stand a chance against the existing top results in Google or not.

Parameter	Site 1	Site 2	Site 3	Site 4	Site 5	My Site
Keyword in URL	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y
Sitelinks	Y					N
Keyword In Title	Y	Y	N	N	Y	Y
Keyword In meta description	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Use H1, H2, Bold tag	Y	Y	Y	Y	N	Y
Use images	N	N	N	Y	N	Y
Ranks for similar keywords	Y	Y	N	Y	Y
Number of backlinks	1000	700	999	3000	5000
Number of dofollow backlinks	500	300	900	400	200
PR6,PR5,PR4 backlinks count
Pagerank	6	5	7	5	5	0
Age	6	4	2	7	5

A competition analysis of my target words reveals that the used cars and second hand cars market is dominated with really strong players while the bikes and mobiles market have players that I can fight against. That is how the decision to target used bikes and used mobiles market was made.

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