How To Find The Hot Spots In Internet Marketing

How To Find The Hot Spots In Internet Marketing

Niches: Hot Spots That Drive InternetMarketing

Whether you are just getting into Internet marketing or have been doing this for a while, you know that developing a niche is key to the success of your Internet marketing efforts. After all, when you are in business on the Internet, you don't necessarily have to produce a particular product first to market it. You don't even have to provide a service to market that either.

Online marketing makes it easy for anyone to get into the business, whether they have experience in any specific business or not. The entire world of products and services are open to market on the Internet, as long as you know how to market using info products and affiliate marketing to sell online. So, where do you start? Isn't it too overwhelming? That's where a market niche becomes an indispensable tool to help you target profitable and interesting markets that can bring attention to your website and help you be successful in your chosen Internet marketing venture.

This report will tell you how to locate hot spots in Internetmarketing topics in a methodical way that anyone can follow. This will save you from implementing topics that you may be passionate about, but in reality, have very little market value. It will also help you locate the most profitable areas to be in and to time them to get in when they will yield riches without too much extra effort. When you know how to pick out great hot spots for topics you will find that your Internet marketing gets quicker and easier.

Why Passion Isn't Enough

Many experts advise you to follow your passion and the money will follow. While this may seem like good advice, the Internet is such a vast landscape that to maximize the potential that your passion matches what people are actually searching for online you need a better plan. So, while passion is a good indication that you will be interested enough to pursue a topic longterm, it's not necessarily the only ingredient you need to succeed.

You actually need to know what topics are popular and being search actively on the Internet, to start understanding how to locate a hot topic. In addition, as an Internet marketer, you want to pick a topic that is profitable, and there are ways to do that using tools like the Google Keyword The tool, which will be discussed later more in depth. And, finally, you want to know how competitive the niche is so that you find a pool that hasn't been over-fished by bigger players.

In Internet marketing terms, what you want to find are hot spot topics that have the following characteristics:

·        High demand
Many people are interested in searching for this topic and they are keying in various phrases to the search engines that can be mined for traffic and profit.

·        High Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
Google establishes the CPC for keywords and phrases. Based on that, you can tell when one word or phrase is more profitable than another based on what advertisers are willing to pay a publisher per click of that keyword or phrase.

·        Low Competition
Since most Internet marketers know that they want a high demand or high CPC to get good niches for profit, they are usually highly competitive too. However, there are still some out there that you can find that is not as competitive and we'll show you how to locate them.

·        Advertisers Present
You want to also find hot spots that are of interest to affiliate or marketing advertisers. At least 20 advertisers for the hot spot shows it is good to try out. 

 

 

Two Methods To Identify The Hot Spots

There are two methods to locate the hot spots in Internet marketing topics: brainstorming them or researching them. Brainstorming is not a bad idea, but if you use it, you should also research and analyze your ideas to make sure they are viable.

Brainstorming

Here, you want to start engaging your creativity to find hot spots that you are passionate about that might have some potential to be great niches. One way to start is to just start trying to look at things from the point of view of a consumer. What are the burning issues consumers are trying to solve? These are the things they will be searching online to resolve.

For instance, you can use your own experience to generate some potential questions consumers might have, like:

1.  Have I invested my savings wisely?

2.  How do I stop a foreclosure?

3.  How can I lose weight quickly?

4.  Do I need to be on antidepressants?

5.  What area in the country has the best job prospects?

Now you begin to see that when people are faced with a question they want an answer to, they aren't going to search for the question, they will actually search for the solution! If you are the marketer, you may be thinking that they will look up weight or foreclosure problems, in actuality, they will be looking for solutions. So, they might type into a search engine:

1.  Where to invest money in 2008

2.  Foreclosure solutions

3.  Weight loss programs

4.  Medical advice on depression

5.  Job markets in the United States

So, when you are brainstorming keywords or phrases, you can start with a basic question that might be being asked, but always try to find the way it might be searched to by using words like cure, solution, program, and so on.

Researching Your Chosen Topics

The next method uses the Google Keyword Tool or something similar (like Overture) that can help you identify 1) other associated keywords or phrase to your niche and 2) how hot the niche really is.

This tool will help you measure the three of the four criteria that keyword or phrase should meet to see if it is worth developing into a full-blown niche. It is located here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal .

Once you have a good idea of some potential keywords or phrases you want to research, you just go to the tool and insert it. It will then generate a list of words or phrases, along with the advertising competition and the monthly approximate search volume for them, for the current month. To see how much the keyword is worth by CPC, you click the drop-down list which states “Show/hide columns.” Then, choose the option to show the estimated average CPC.

This will give you an idea of how competitive and how profitable the keyword or phrases you have brainstormed might be, and also how valuable to you as an Internet marketer the niche might be. Keep doing this for all the keywords or phrases, and try to find some that aren't as competitive, have a high CPC and high search volume (demand).

You can even take keyword phrases generated by the tool and plug those in to see if it comes up with different keyword phrases that are better choices. As you do this process, it will help you to define your target niche better and also give you more ideas on some niches you may start to recognize as you go along this process.

How Hot Is It?

When you have some good choices, you will have a list of choices to investigate further. You still want to check to see if advertisers are interested in doing affiliate marketing offers. You will want to consider other environmental factors that might contribute to it's “hot” factor. You'll want to know how many people are talking about this topic. Is it too controversial to handle? It's not just the Google Keyword analysis that will determine whether this the “hot” topic is a good topic to develop more. You will want to see what else you can find out about this topic to determine if you want to pursue it.

For instance, in terms of how many people are talking about it or whether affiliate marketers are interested in it, you will have to do a little further snooping. You can go to your affiliate bank programs, that you've already signed up as a publisher, and find out what affiliates offers are available that might match the niche. Some of these sites are www.clickbank.com or www.cj.com. After you log in, try to find what offers you might be able to put up on your web pages should you decide to target that niche. If you find very few, that this is an indication that advertisers are not that interested in this niche.

Another way to find out who is interested and how much it is being talked about is to enter the keyword phrase into Google and see how many search results come up. If it is highly competitive, you will get too many results. If there is little interest, you will only get a few results. This will help you determine whether you have either too broad or too narrow a topic to generate the kind of interest you need to make money with it.

Other Factors To Consider

Let's face it, current events are big news, but they are also highly transitory. The hot topics of the day may reach a Category 5 storm one day and be non-existent on the radar screen the next day. So, even though some topics are hot, intensely hot, that doesn't mean they have staying power. If you want to ride a wave, then it's okay to use them, just be aware that this is the case.

Here a few more factors to consider as you research your niche to decide if it is going to be a good one to do:

·        Intensity
How much interest is there worldwide? Is it an event of major impact all over the world or regionally? Is it relevant to some current event that is high on people's minds for now?

·        Duration
This is the lifespan of that particular hot topic. Maybe, like the Olympics, it's a high-intensity event with a very short duration. In that case, you either need to plan ahead to get out after a bit or to market much earlier than the actual event, to maximize sales.

·        Spin-offs
Even if the hot spot is short duration, but high intensity, is it possible it is going to evolve into another area of major interest? In that case, you might want to plan ahead for the potential spin-offs in topic themes that can occur.

Research The Hot Spot Online

Okay, so you've picked some hot spots that you are excited about. Congratulations! You're almost home now. In order to really get a good feel for each hot spot, you'll want to check out the trends and what people are saying about that particular niche, before you go writing multiple sales copy and articles that no one is interested in, even with a hot niche. By figuring out exactly what about the niche is interesting to others, you will be headed in a good way towards narrowing and defining the hot spot in a much more precise way.

To do that, there are several places you can go to get some additional information on your hot topics:

·        Google Trends
This is a great tool set up by Google to focus on the trends happening in a particular segment. It allows you to see how the search volume is trending over the years. The best part of this tool, however, is the ability to put multiple hot topics in (separated by commas) and then be able to compare the volume trends per year in comparison to both. This way you can determine which one is actually the best hot topic, based on whether it shows it is trending upwards and how it compares to the search traffic of different hot topics. It is located at http://www.google.com/trends

·        Yahoo! Buzz
This uses the Yahoo! Search engine functionality to return hot topics based on what's being searched there. You will see some top searches displayed as well as up and coming hot topics. You can also plug in your own terms and see what people are saying about that. It is located at http://buzz.yahoo.com

·        Technorati BloggerCentral
This is a directory of blogs that also tracks the topics these blogs discuss. So, it can be an excellent way to initialize the brainstorming of topics of interest since they have an are where you can see the top blogs and also popular topics being discussed. It is located at http://www.technorati.com under the BloggerCentral tab.

·        Digg
This is a user-driven listing of hot topics. In other words, people vote to “Digg” a topic or not and based on the voting system, the rating of that topic climbs in the ranking. It's a great social networking type of search engine and trend-spotting site all in one. Add your phrases there and see what topics of interest people “dug” for your particular niche. It is separated into categories that can also be searched separately. It is located at http://www.digg.com

Research The Topic Offline

For people who really want to get into their chosen niche, there's no reason you can get some great research already done by others. Barnes and Nobles put out a series of guides called “quamuts”on practically every subject out there. They are small enough to read very quickly but comprehensive enough to give you a broad view of your subject. You can get them offline by going to Barnes and Noble and picking up a hard copy for yourself.

These quamuts are available online too, at http://www.quamut.com, even though it's still Barnes and Noble selling them. If you order them online, they are much easier to search through to see if your topic has a guide or not. Obviously, if there is no a guide, odds are the subject is suspect. If it is a profitable topic, Barnes and Noble would have done a guide on it, right? You can even get really small quamuts to download from your personal computer for just $2.95 for a pdf copy. Print it out on your printer and you've got a great library of comprehensive guides right at your fingertips.

Narrow To Pinpoint Precision

We've talked a little about how a very broad subject will be highly competitive or hard to attract an audience. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a very narrow subject won't even have anyone interested in it, or at least very few. To find a hot spot in Internet marketing topics that is just the right size can be a game of trial and error.

You can do this manually, by starting out with a broad category and then drilling down to more specific subtopics within the main topic. You can use the tools we've given you to find out exactly how popular a topic is and whether it is worth pursuing. This takes quite a bit of time to do. Even after you locate just the right niche, you will have to locate affiliate programs to make the hot spots work to be profitable areas for you.

If you have a bit of money, you may decide that the fastest way to do this is to pay someone else to do it for you. There are products out there that can help you use your keyword phrase to instantly find niches that are profitable AND give you affiliate offer information too.

Test The Results

Whether you use a third-party software program or try to engage your own list of hot topics, you will want to test your selection to see how they work in real life, or should we say “virtual life.” That means, that you will actually start to take some of your research and implement it to test to see if it will be a winner or not.

You can do a short test simply by adding a review to one of your blogs for a product that is associated with one of your niches. You use the keyword phrases you've developed to help drive traffic to the blog related to that niche. You can write a few articles and submit them to article directories with some of the same keyword phrases. Use the resource box to drive traffic back to the blog where your offer resides.

You should do this with several sites, actually. You want to be able to test several niches at the same time with a various different keyword phrases that target either different aspects of the same niche or different niches entirely. Depending on the amount of advertising revenue from Google or product sales from the offer on your blog, you have a pretty good idea how it will work out if you do a full blown site developed on the same concept.

So, it really is a matter of trial and error. Just keep trying different niches until you find a winner, and then expand that every which way you know to generate maximum profit. Remember to focus on generating attention and exposure for your offers to get the niche to be a money-maker.

Some Sample Niches Based On Adwords Campaigns

This is a list developed in August of 2008. As with anything, the actual hot spots shift as interest in the shift on the Internet. But, you can get a pretty good view of some of the hot topics that pay well according to Google Adwords CPC. It doesn't mean they make great niches to market, as they may be highly competitive, but it certainly gives you a starting point for what topics you should pay attention to as 2008 closes out.

Here are some identified to be important to watch:

·        Anti-ageing

·        Automotive

·        Banking and Finance

·        Cancer (Great one to drill down further and develop multiple sites for different types of cancer)

·        Computer Repair

·        Credit and Finance

·        Debt Consolidation

·        Distant Learning

·        Exotic Restaurants and Foods

·        General Health

·        ISP and Networking

·        Loans and Mortgages

·        Online Degree

·        Psychotherapy

·        Solar Panels

·        Weight Loss

Other Hot Markets To Find Hot Spots Within

Sometimes you can locate hot spots just by finding what's hot in a specific industry. For instance, if you look at the above list, you'll see more topics on finance and loans than anything else. Well, the economy has been a top issue in 2008 and it's not surprising to see more people interested in that area than others. So, if you know what's going on in certain areas of the markets out there, you already have a good idea of where to get great hot spot ideas to research.

We'll go over a number of rich areas to investigate, as you think up your own hot spots to start your Internet marketing venture.

·        Beauty
Image is very important in our culture and this goes along with anti-ageing that is becoming more important for baby boomers. It's a very good place to start and has lots of potential for products to market and affiliate offers. The types of things that might be marketed in this niche are cosmetics, hairstyles, plastic surgery, anti-ageing programs, and more.

·        Success
This area is about creating an aura of accomplishment and learning how to be successful in life through motivation programs, inspirational guides, tips to make money, network better, or just project an image of success.

·        Organizational
You would not believe how many people want to find ways to organize their lives so that they either have more time, less stress, or just a way to fit everything that they do or own into their lives neatly. This is a good area for office supplies and calendars, but don't think you can't go further with it. You can sell things for organizing every room in the household, plus the closets!

·        Getting Hired
Unfortunately, with unemployment being over 5% in the United States, there are many, many people looking for a job. When that happens, you can bet they are online trying to figure out ways to get hired. They might be looking for tips on how to dress, how to interview, resume or job listing services. You can use that to develop an authority site that can sell some services for the job seeker too or put hiring people in contact with people who are looking, like Monster.com. Then, you can have a huge audience that will be highly attractive to advertisers.

·        Health and Wellness
If you haven't got your health, you've got nothing, right? The topic of health and wellness never goes out of style. This niche is so wide, that you really have to specialize and lucky for everyone, you could specialize forever and never be done. So, think about this from the viewpoint of every type of health and wellness possibility out there: alternative health, supplements, exercise programs, disease prevention, medical information, or diets. It really is a very big field and you can even target it specifically to one condition or disease and do multiple sites for different conditions or diseases. On top of informational products that you can sell, this is a big area to sell other health aide products online.

·        Entertainment
Like health and wellness, this topic never goes out style too. People like to be entertained and distracted from their troubles. It can involve something as simple as a computer game to something as luxurious as an exotic vacation trip. You can even sell accessories that help people fantasize about how they will be entertained in the future too, as well as selling products that do it now. You can sell online tickets, events, music downloads, books, and vacation packages online.

·        How To
This is a very popular type of niche. People get online to find out how to do things. They want to learn and be educated. They want to find a new skill or talent. So, it's a great area for online classes, workshops, informational products, forums, groups, how-to videos, and training seminars. All you have to do for this particular area is to figure out a very popular thing that everyone wants to learn how to do.

·        Self-Improvement
Aside from success-oriented improvements in life, people also like to improve themselves for the pleasure of becoming better people. So, this area can be anything from motivational tapes to hypnosis to stop smoking. It can include spiritual information to help people improve their character or religious ideals. It's all set up to help people develop their inner being to the highest potential. For that, the area is best for informational products or classes and seminars. However, you can also sell aides like motivational tapes, books, and on the occasion, even some unique self-improvement aides.

·        Leadership
All kinds of people either are seeking to get into leadership positions or are already there. They make the perfect audience for the types of products to guide them into how to be an effective leader. This can include information on networking, communication, education, and coordination skills that leaders need to develop. You can also sell tools that help them organize people better or schedule tasks more easily.

·        Satisfying A Craving
This deals with people undergoing particular programs that deny them satisfaction. Like when people try to quit smoking, they need to distract their minds and they sometimes need products to take the place of the craving like gum or sweets. When people are dieting, they also might have similar cravings for sweets, fats, or alcohol. Then, you can offer products that will fall within the guidelines of a diet plan but satisfy the craving non-the-less. These tend to be a bit trendy but can yield quick profits, like in the case of the Atkins diet, which spawned an entire industry of low carbohydrate foods, plans, menus, and books, for people on it.

·        Home-based Businesses
With high unemployment and gas prices, more and more people are looking to get into home-based businesses. This can be a great place to sell info products in different ways to develop a home-based business. You can also sell to people already doing it like people who help people deliver their eBay sales to customers for a commission. You might even want to have templates and programs that appeal to home-based business people who have to learn all about running their own part-time business.

Any topic that you become an expert can be mined to find the hot spot within it using the techniques found in this book. You can even convert a hobby you have into a very profitable Internet marketing opportunity and take advantage of the skills and knowledge you already have. Maybe you are an avid fly fisherman. There's no reason you can't research that topic to see how to sell products online and use keyword phrases to generate money for you. Then, you get the best of both worlds: a profitable plan to use a hot topic for Internet marketing and the joy of working in an area you already love anyways! That's how you combine both your passion and your intelligence to create opportunities that speak to your soul, while generating a healthy bottom line.