There is no industry that is as versatile as the Internet.
There is barely anything like conventional business success systems online.
Things change overnight here.
Old ways of doing things die away and totally new ones spring up in the twinkling of an eye.
As a result, your success and failure online is a function of how often and effectively you do constantly and regularly keep your eyes wide open and research the trends in your niche.
Here are a few tips to effectively research your niche of interest, whether you are just starting out on it or are already involved in it.
1.
Determine Your Passion and Expertise: Don't make your internet business another J-O-B.
Be sure that you are in love with the business model that you want to pursue online.
Don't choose something that will take all your time and frustrate your efforts at building a profitable home business.
If it doesn't make life easier than it would have been under a boss, reconsider it.
2.
Choose Your Niche: The next (and probably really first) step in your niche research is to choose a niche that you are comfortable with.
Based on your prior experiences and professional training and your personal passions and hobbies, look for a niche that can make you money.
If your hobby is golf, for example, can you produce information products that you can sell to golf fanatics? Or do you have golf-related products that you can sell? If apart from your passion for this niche you also have some products or services that you can offer, then stick with it.
3.
Create a List of Keywords: You now have to come with a list of keywords related to your chosen niche.
Think of all the terms, tools and services that golf enthusiasts love and write them down in your word processor.
You should have at least ten related keywords based on your chosen niche.
4.
Do Keyword Research: Using golf as the niche you have chosen above, you will head over to Wordtracker, Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool or any other reliable keyword tool and type in "golf" and see what comes up.
You will probably have a few dozen terms and keywords come up.
Copy and paste those results into your word processor.
Search each of the keywords in the list that you manually created and document the results.
5.
Filter out Loser Keywords: Now, among the list of keywords that the keyword tools bring up, filter out the "losers".
These are keywords that indicate that the searchers are only looking for free information and not ready to buy.
While these may be helpful if you are targeting free search engine traffic, they drain your budget big time if you are going to buy traffic from Google Adwords, Overture, etc.
You don't want some freebie seeker clicking on your ads and making you lose money.
6.
Spy on Your Competition: It is always a good idea in business to keep one eye on your business and the other on your competition.
There are two ways of studying and replicating your competitors' success online.
You can go to the search engines and key in your niche keywords.
The first 10 to 20 results are your toughest competitors.
Go to their sites and see what they are doing in terms keyword targeting and SEO and apply the same things on your site.
If you can "steal" two or three strategies from each one and apply them in your own website, you will end up dominating them all in no time.
Another way is to use search engine software that help you determine what keywords your competition is targeting, whom they are trading links with, etc.
This way, you just do as they do, in addition to other strategies you have already learnt, and you will hopefully get listed above them very soon and generate insane traffic.
7.
Build Targeted Pages: Once you have determined the winning keywords for your niche, your next step is to setup pages that target those keywords.
I have explained this in more detail in "Explosive Online Niche Research".
Once you have the pages set up, start promoting them and see what results you get.
Follow these seven effective niche research steps and you will see the big difference they make in your business.