Finding Profitable Markets

The single biggest mistake many people make when starting a business is they'll create a product... usually based on something they just enjoy doing, which in and of itself isn't bad, BUT... after they spend months creating this product, it's finally time to start making money selling it.

This is where many people run into MAJOR problems. They have no idea where to find the people that want to buy what they have to offer. They end up spinning their wheels and finally realize that nobody wants to buy their latest and greatest product that they've spent months of their life creating.

Not only can this be extremely frustrating, but it ends up being a complete waste of time and money!

What people should be doing is finding the "market" FIRST and THEN create the product based on what the market wants. That is so much easier than creating the product and then "finding" the market, which might not exist in the first place.

Ok, now you might be saying to yourself... "Brad, this is nothing new... we all know this already." If that's you, great... but I wanted to start this chapter with those few, very important points, before we get to the meat of the chapter.

In this chapter I'll be showing you 1 very good way to find profitable markets. Once you find these markets you could either create Adsense websites based on the topics OR you could create entire products around the topic...OR better yet, you could do both!

So, let's begin...

We'll start off by doing some Keyword Research. We need to find out what words people are search for online. The more times someone searches for a word, the more popular that word is.

Makes sense, right?

There are many different ways to find out roughly how many times, per month, people are searching for various keywords. The free way of doing this is to use the Overture search

term suggestion tool. I use Keyword Elite to gather this data, but if you want to go the slower, cheaper route, use Overture.

So, we'll go to http://www.inventory.overture.com/ and we'll start our keyword research. In this example, let's start off with the main topic "gardening".

You can see down the left hand side are numbers. These numbers represent the number

of times that the keyword has been search during the previous month, within the overture.com search engine. Typically, you can multiply that number by about 7, to come up with the number of times that word has been searched in Google.

We'll call the numbers under the "count column", "Searches". So the keyword: organic gardening was searched for 17,246 times last month.

Next, we need to see how much competition there is for each of these keywords. By competition, I mean how many other websites there are that seem to be promoting something related to each keyword.

We'll go to Google and enter the keyword "organic gardening".

When we do this, you can see that there are 17,000,000 websites in Google that are listed for the search term "organic gardening". That sure is a lot of competition.

Now, here's a little trick that you should do to REALLY find out which websites are actually promoting something related to "organic gardening". There's a little search command you can enter into Google and Google will only display websites that contain the keyword in the Title of their web page only.

Think about it... If the website doesn't have the keyword in the title of their site, chances are... they probably aren't promoting the product, but maybe just mention the word once or twice on the page.

So, by using this special search command, we'll be able to get a MUCH better estimate on the actual number of sites promoting something related to this keyword. Let's go back to Google and enter this special search command: allintitle: organic gardening

You can see when we do this, the number of websites decreases all the way to 140,000!

That's a much more reasonable amount... Don't you think?

Alright, we'll call this number (140,000) "Results"

Once we have these 2 numbers, we can use them to calculate something called an R/S ratio, which is basically a ratio used to determine how much demand there is for a product/keyword.

R = Results

S = Searches

From our example above, we've said that the keyword "organic gardening" was searched 17,246 times last month, so S wouldbe17,246.

We've also found that their were 140,000 websites advertising this keyword, so R would be 140,000

Now, let's divide the 2 numbers

140,000/17,246 = 8.12

Our R/S ratio for this keyword is 8.12. I know from experience that this isn't a very good R/S ratio. Typically the lower the number is, the more profitable the keyword will be for you, should you decide to create a website based on the keyword.

What you'll need to do is go through each of the keywords in your list and come up with R/S ratios for all of them. Then, pick the keyword(s) that have a low R/S ratio and yet have quite a few searches the previous month.

I know what you're saying... This is hard frickin' work! You're right... I hate doing it.

So, let me show you a much easier way to do this, using Keyword Elite. This is a cool new tool that saves me a heck of a lot of time and I figure, what the heck... I might as well show you an easier way to do this... but remember, you don't have to do it the quick way. You CAN do this manually if you want.