Niche Research with Clickbank

I'm going to show you how I do my niche research and keyword research.

ClickBank

First I go to the ClickBank marketplace. Most products I promote are from ClickBank, so I recommend you look there as well.

Then I choose a category, or just type the topic I'm interested in into the search box.

I look for products that have a high gravity (above 30), and then I check to see whether there are any other products in the same niche that also have gravity over 30.

For instance, I might see from browsing through the "Home and family" section of the marketplace that "Reverse Phone Detective" has a very high gravity. This means that lots of people are getting sales with this product.

To see whether this would be worth me pursuing, I look to see if there are other products in the marketplace that I could promote alongside it. So I type "reverse phone" into the keyword search box and see what shows up.

There are a couple of other products that look ok. If I search for "phone" nothing shows up, "records" gives me one kind of similar product... so I need to stretch my brain a little bit and think about WHY someone would want to buy these kinds of products... perhaps it's because they suspect their partner or spouse is cheating on them? If I type "catch cheat" in there, I might find some other products.

So it looks like there are a couple of good products in this market. There are two reasons I like to go into niches where there are a number of good affiliate programs to promote :

1. It means that I have a chance to make multiple sales from the one customer

2. It gives me an opportunity to try to rank highly for the product names. People searching the web for product names are halfway to buying anyway, and if I can get a page ranking highly for an affiliate product name, I know that it will convert very well to sales. They're also generally less competitive search terms to go after!

For example, if you type "Zygor's guide review" you find my site pops up at number two in the search results. (I show you how I build this site in this course). I make two sales a day from this page, just by helping to close the sale by putting a positive review on my site.

Another reason to look for markets where there are lots of products with high gravity, is that it means that there is a lot of pie to go around. There's a lot of money in the market, and a lot of people are able to find their share of it. Don't think about "how competitive" the market is... think about how big the pie is, and how big a share you're able to grab (especially given that you've got a great blueprint here that others don't have!).

Google Insights for Search

Once I've got a good idea of a niche I want to go into, I go to Google Insights for Search.

Type in a few search terms related to your niche. For instance, if I decided to go into the "weight loss" niche, I might type in: Weight loss, burn fat, 6 pack abs, muscle building.

I then choose to filter my results by the United States, because this is a market that I tend to make about 80% of my sales in, so I want to make sure the results I get from Google Insights are relevant to my main market. (If I didn't narrow it down, I would also get results from parts of the world that don't tend to buy anything, such as 3rd world countries. Having these results in the mix would skew things and I wouldn't get such a clear view of the trends.)

I then click "Search" and I see a bunch of results on the page. At the top of the page I can see the trends in search volumes for those keywords over time... dating from all the way back in 2004! This is useful for seeing if a market is gaining in popularity or losing popularity, or if there are certain seasonal trends in the market.

For instance, with my results I see that "weight loss" far outstrips all the others in terms of search volume. That's not to say that the other words aren't popular or profitable words... it just means that "weight loss" is much, much bigger than all of them. I can also see that there are some distinct seasonal trends with "weight loss" — it seems that there is a predictable surge in the number of people searching for "weight loss" in January each year (overeating over Christmas?) and a smaller bump in the middle of the year (people wanting to lose weight to fit into swimsuits?).

If you log into your Google account you will see some numbers on the graph as well. (Editor's note: These ARE NOT actual search numbers, as Mark states in the video — they are just normalized numerical representations of what you're seeing on the graph. The highest search volume EVER will be ranked at 100, and all other figures are essentially a percentage of that highest figure ever. So our top peak after Christmas is 100, while just before Christmas it might have been at 67. These numbers will only ever be between 0 and 100, so they're obviously not search volumes! )

What I like to do next is look at the "rising searches" box. Here you can see search terms that are starting to be searched for more often than average. (Based on historical performance of that keyword). This means that they're gaining popularity. If you click on one search term, it will tell you other keywords related to that keyword.

If I focus on my World of Warcraft market, I can type "wow guide", "world of warcraft guide", "wow gold guide" into the search box. The graph shows me that this market really has grown over the past few years. I can also see the breakout search terms at the bottom and I can see a bunch of keywords that I should be focusing on, because the number of searches for them is increasing. I haven't added my "enchanting guide" to my website yet, but I can see that "wow enchanting guide" is a search term that is on the rise — so I should get onto it pretty soon!

This can give you a really good idea for the market, particularly if you don't know your market all that well. Remember that when you click on words it will give you related search terms, and it's really good for finding ones that you wouldn't have thought of before. Keep an eye out for product names in these lists. If you see a product name, and that product has an affiliate program, it would be really worthwhile to sign up for it!

You can see keyword suggestions and get an idea of search volumes for keywords related to each distinct keyword that you typed into the top box: Use the drop-down menu to switch between your different keywords (if you entered more than one to begin with).

Traffic Travis

You can get Traffic Travis from www.traffictravis.com . There is a free edition and a professional edition, but the free edition has almost everything that the professional edition has, and is more than adequate for your needs.

Note: If you buy the Affilorama Course you can ask Mark Ling for a copy of Traffic Travis. He gave it out FREE with his last course.

We're going to use Traffic Travis to build a really, really big keyword list. And later we're going to sort and narrow down this keyword list, but for now we just need a big one.

If I click on "keyword tools" and type a keyword into the search box. If I type in "world of warcraft" It will return 200 keywords related to "world of warcraft". I'm not going to be picky at this stage... I just right-click on all those search terms and choose "select all", and then click the "move to saved" button at the bottom in order to move them to your "saved keywords" list.

You can then repeat the process with a different keyword at the first step. I can enter "wow paladin guide", and receive a bunch of keywords related to that. Right-click on the keywords, choose "select all", then click "move to saved" to add them to your big list.

Keep going with this until you build the biggest keyword list you can.

Note: When you see a dash ( – ) in the search count column for a keyword in Traffic Travis, it doesn't mean that there are "no searches" for that keyword. It simply means that we don't have the information in our database yet. The simple fact that the keyword is on the list means that there are people searching for it! You'll usually find that the actual search count will be displayed if you perform the search again a week later, at the latest.

What we're most interested in here, though, is getting a big list. You can always check out the actual search volumes later using Googles free keyword tool.

Using forums:

If you don't know anything about your topic, forums are going to be very useful for you! I didn't know anything about WoW when I started building this website (I know quite a lot now!), so I went into a lot of forums and looked at what people were talking about. They were throwing around words like "mage", "warlock" and all these other weird sounding terms, so I started writing these down.

It's easier to see what the major topics in your niche are if you visit forums that are well categorized. The first forum I look at in this video isn't well categorized, but the second one is well categorized: I see categories like "Wrath of the Lich King" and "PvP" are major categories on this World of Warcraft forum. There are probably going to be people searching for "wow pvp".

I wouldn't have ever thought of that keyword before visiting the forum. This is why forums are so useful!

If I take that keyword and plug it into Traffic Travis I see a bunch of keywords based on "wow pvp". I can add these to my list as well.

Make sure you get a variety

The reason for gathering such a large group of keywords is because you really want to make sure you're not missing anything out, and that you find a range of topics to write your articles about. If you only find keywords based on a few aspects of your market, you're going to find that your articles sound very similar! For instance, if you're in the "weight loss" market, you don't want all your articles to be on topics like "weight loss", "weight loss pills", "weight loss tips", "how to lose weight", "fast weight loss" etc. They all sound pretty similar, and it makes it really hard to write articles! Sure you CAN write articles about all these things, but tackle these very similar terms if you start getting towards 300 articles on your site. When you're just doing 30 articles on your site (like we're doing here in AffiloBlueprint) then you want to try to have a little more variety in your keywords.

In my WoW site, I don't just have "WoW guide", "How to play WoW", "WoW strategy guide", etc. My articles are all different: "Levelling guide, hoard guide, cooking guide, shaman guide" etc.

For "weight loss" you could have "how to lose weight", but you could also have "how to lose belly fat", "how to lose pregnancy weight", "the truth about 6-pack ads", "fat loss 4 idiots review". Etc.

They don't have to be massively different, but just get as much variety as you can. It also looks more natural to the search engines.

Back to Traffic Travis...

Run your keywords through PPC analysis in Traffic Travis (if you want).

This is an optional but interesting step you might use in your keyword research. You can set up a new PPC project in Traffic Travis (click "add project" and paste in your giant list of keywords).

Once your keywords are added and you've run an update to grab the data about those keywords, you can click the "Top sites for keywords" tab, and then "fetch sites" to find all the people advertising on those keywords on PPC. You can use the keywords these sites are bidding on as a good starting point for choosing your own keywords, because chances are good that these keywords are profitable. Even if you're not going to be performing PPC, it's never a bad idea to consider which words are profitable in PPC when building an SEO site! If they're profitable in PPC, they'll DEFINITELY be profitable in SEO!

Don't focus on individual keywords... focus on "categories"

When I'm building my list of 30 articles, I like to have at least 5 of my articles reviewing different affiliate products, and the rest of the articles should be based on different categories. I don't have dozens of different search terms based on the one topic (WoW leveling guide, WoW leveling, WoW leveling fishing, WoW leveling tips.... etc). I just choose the broad category term. Sometimes I opt for an extra keyword in the same category and split my article in half, linking to the second half of the article using the second keyword. But usually I just have one article in each category. It's possible, later on, to flesh out your articles so that they're targeting each and every keyword (even if it gets repetitive!), but for now... just have one article for each general category.

How to categorize your keywords

This is why we need a really giant list of keywords. Go back into Traffic Travis and look at this big list that we've got sitting in your keyword "saved" list. Click the "send to sorter" button at the bottom to send them to the keyword sorter.

Look through your list quickly to see words that come up often in your list.

Type those words into the "search for keywords that contain" box and type in the word that you think might be a broad category.

For instance
I see that "paladin" comes up often in my list.

I can type "paladin" into the "search list for keywords that contain" box, and it will separate out all the keywords in my list that contain "paladin".

I can then look at the "matching keywords" box and click "save as a set". This will add those keywords to a "paladin" category.

I can then look at the "non matching keywords" list and click "replace keywords" to send them back to the giant list WITHOUT the paladin keywords. (They've been taken out.)

I can keep going through my list, separating my keywords into groups and clicking "save as set". Once I'm done, I can click the little disk icon next to the "saved sets" box to save my nicely categorized groups of keywords!

Now you can look at your categories and decide on one (or perhaps two) articles you'd like to write for each category.

This list is also very handy if you decide you ever want to ramp things up and do a little PPC. The categories will also be your Adgroups!

This is an extract from Mark Ling the boss of Affilorama for whom I am an affiliate. To check out his great product go to Affilorama Blueprint for more details...