Article by Edward Thorpe

Most Newbies are taught to look for a group of related buyers when they’re searching for a niche to target. Good advice, I think.

But, an equally effective niche research strategy is doing the opposite. For simplicity’s sake, I’ve termed this opposite niche research strategy, ‘Reverse Niche Research’ (RNR).

As the term RNR implies, your research starts with finding popular products or services people are already buying online.

Secondly, you’d search for keywords to market those items.

Thirdly, you’d look at the number of searches for the keywords.

Fourthly, you research and evaluate the competition for the keywords you’ve compiled.

Finally, you consider your collected data and decide whether to go after the target market.

By the way, the RNR method works for both digital products and for physical products or services. Today, we’ll overview using the RNR strategy for digital products.

You can find popular digital products at web sites like: Clickbank, Paydotcom, and at CPA directories.

The discovery method at Clickbank/maketplace, for example, goes something like this:

1. Choose a category. Within the chosen category, choose a product with ‘gravity’ above 30, paying a commission above . (Theoretically, the higher the gravity, the more sales being made by affiliates.)

2. Load the product’s sales page and confirm the owner isn’t pimping for affiliates on the sales page. Links for affiliates are usually placed at page’s bottom. (Why tempt a prospect to join the affiliate program and then buy from themselves?)

3. If no affiliate link, then judge the product’s sales page for overall appearance, layout, clarity, salesmanship, and buying process. (Assume the likely prospect’s persona and click through the ordering process. You can stop before buying.)

4. Right click on the sales page and ‘view source’. Copy any keywords being used into a text file, like MS Notebook. Caveat: with some of today’s popular web authoring tools, you won’t always find keywords in the ‘source’ code.

At this point of your RNR, you need to know about monthly searches, and about the competition. Before you can get such information, you’ll need some relevant keywords to research.

If you found keywords in the source code of the salespage, start with those. Otherwise jump directly into the following process:

1. Go to Google’s External Keyword Adwords Tool and paste the products sales page URL into the ‘website’ window and click ‘get keywords’.

2. You’ll find the keywords being used on the sales page listed in the left hand column under ‘contains’ heading.

3. And, the ‘keyword ideas’ section gives other keyword suggestions for your research.

4. Change column display to: ‘local search’ and ‘average cpc’. Copy the keywords in ‘contains’ and the keywords in ‘keyword ideas’ into your text file for later use.

5. Change the ‘search’ settings from ‘broad’ to ‘exact’. Repeat process you did in step 4.

Summation of what you now have:

1. A possible digital affiliate product sales page you can direct prospects to.

2. List of keywords used on the product owner’s sales page.

3. List keyword ideas from the biggest search engine on the planet.

4. List of approximate prices advertisers are willing to pay for a click from Google Adwords.

Yeah OK, wonderful. What’s next?

Now you pick about 20 – 25 keyword phrases with over 1,000 – 1,500 monthly searches and evaluate the competition’s strength for those keywords.

If you can beat the top 5 – 6 websites for at least 5 of your keyword phrases, do it.

In part 2, I’ll show you how to ‘do it’.

You’ll discover how to spy on the competition without them knowing what hit them.

Plus, we’ll look at a simple methodology for deciding which competitors are ripe for picking off. Off of their search engine spot, that is.

You can use my Reverse Niche Research strategy to discover hot markets to target and profit from. RNR can also be used to reveal whether your competitors are primed for a takeover.

Stay tuned for part two: Reverse Niche Research: Competition Spy…

About the Author

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