Business Home Idea Internet Opportunity

- Part III -

In -Part I- of our series titled How To Find Small Business Startup Idea we have defined what is niche marketing and the four elements that identify a profitable niche.

In -Part II- of our series we have defined the most used tools to Find the Perfect Small Home Business Idea.

How To Make Sure That Your Small Business Startup Idea Of Your Choice Is Profitable!

Now that I have a list of potential niches and sub-niches to work with, I want to make sure my business home idea Internet opportunity is profitable.

You want to build a business to make money. You don’t want to waste your time or to be just another imitation. So, make sure you get the best idea home business opportunity. Don’t rush it. Spend the needed time and you will create a money making business.

Just because a niche or a sub-niche is popular doesn’t mean it’s profitable. We want to be as certain as we can that our niche is focused enough but big enough, and that the people in that niche spend money.

1 - Keywords Tools

So, first I start with a free trial Keywords tool. I type in the key phrase (s) I think are going to work on my site and see how many times that keyword and all related keywords were searched in the previous month.

I like to see no less than 10,000 searches for all keywords combined, but not more than, say, 50,000 or so.

Note: Some times I find profitable business home idea internet opportunity that have only a few thousand searches at Overture, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

Overture searches are reported on a monthly basis. In many cases Overture lumps other variations in with the same search, so those numbers will include searches for variations and some misspellings. So, bear in mind that the number of actual searches might be lower.

Overture searches are for Yahoo and their partner sites, so to measure the number of searches on Google, I usually estimate between 5 and 10 times this number to come up with Google’s searches.

If I’m happy with the number of searches for this potential niche, I next want to see how much pay per clicks (PPC) are going to cost me on Google Adwords. For that I use Overture’s “View Bids Tool.” (You need to open an account to be able to use this tool).

The bid process also tells me a little about the moneymaking opportunities of a market. As a loose rule, if the max bid results are between 30 cents and $2.00, it’s a good indicator that people are making money in this market.

Some times a bid over $2.00 means that the competition is fierce for my tastes, but depending on your market and eventual product selling price and demand, it may make sense for you.

Lets take the piano niche as an example. It is too broad niche. It has a high amount of searches, but the bids for PPC traffic is too low. As a result, I would suspect that people are generally not making a lot of money with that search term.

Fly-fishing, on the other hand, does have PPC bids between 30 cents and $2.00, so money is likely being made there. However, the search term itself is too low. Unless you have other keywords for that niche to add additional traffic, I would steer clear from there as well.

To check on the companies that are bidding on my keywords in Google Adwords, I use http://www.googspy.com.

Scond I visit Google's Trends - This is an effective tool that allows you to track how often specific search terms are being entered into the Google search engine. It shows over the last few years whether the quantity of searches for a particular term is increasing or decreasing but It doesn't tell you exactly how many times the term has been searched.

There’s lots of useful information there. You can see that the news volume is synced with the search volume, and several notable news articles are displayed, along with where they occurred on the timeline.

In the lower section, you can see which countries, cities, and languages made the most searches. Be aware that the indicators are normalized, meaning they are adjusted for that region’s population.

For example, South Africa has about 44 million people, compared with the U.S.’s 295 million. So the U.S. may have performed more actual searches, but after the adjustment is made, South Africa comes on top for “fly fishing” term. In the upper-right corner of the page, you can switch regions (e.g. if you wanted to check the U.S. only), and you can change the time period also.
The work is already done for you. You just need to put it to good use.

Remember, high volume + low PPC bids = low click through rates and even lower conversions.

2 - What People Are Talking About?

If done properly keyword research is a good way to find what is hot in the market. Also finding what people are talking about is as important as keyword searches.
There are several sites I use to get niche ideas, and especially to narrow the niche and discover potential information the market wants:

• Google Groups
• Craig's List
• Delicious Popular
• Dig
• Google Catalogs
• Google Suggest
• Technorati

Technorati is perhaps one of the most useful research sites out there in terms of finding out what people are talking about, not just searching for.Technorati collects information on what 52-million+ blogs and bloggers are writing about. They analyze and publish their findings within minutes.

Technorati is a good place where you can find out what large groups of people are interested in right now.

3 - Magazines

Ok, the next thing I'll do is checking how many magazines are there on the subject of my chosen niche.

There are two places I go online for that:

Magazines.com - and,
Amazon magazines .

At each site, I search by category to find the magazines in my niche.

For example, golf has a lot of magazines, but it's not a good niche by itself. It needs to be more targeted. But in that case I can always get more targeted sub-niche ideas within that topic by looking at the types of magazines for that topic.

Now, as good as these sites are for finding magazines, I'm still going to need to go to a bookstore that carries lots of magazines and browse through the ones in my niche?

Why?

Because I want to see what kinds of ads are in them. I need to know who else is selling what, and it will also tell me whether the people in this niche spend money. And the ads will not only tell me that, but they will also tell me what the people in this niche spend their money ON.

And, if I want to know which ads keep appearing (because then I'll know they are making money), I would want to pick up several issues in a row of the same magazine, if possible.
Ok.

By now I should have a pretty good niche market to test. And by knowing what kinds of informational products are selling, I can start to formulate the content I’m going to use for my test.

By now you should have a pretty good business home idea Internet opportunity and what has been consistently hot over the long term.

Now use that research you've already done to extent out what's already available online in the niches you've been researching. Make sure to visit your competitors’ websites to see how are they setting up their sites? Are the most popular sites in the niche forums, info sites, blogs, online stores, social networking sites, etc.?

There are many other sources online and offline that are just as good or better than the ones mentioned here, but for now those cover much more than most people will ever use to do online research.

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