Niche Inspector Review

There’s a helluva lot of advertiser information in your Niche Inspector data. It is important to you as a publisher. You need to see where advertisers are spending money.

Once you find a niche where advertisers are spending you need to stand back, consider your goals, then develop a plan.

Do not just filter your list to get rid of keywords with a pay per click below an arbitrary level. Look at all your options, then rank your list.

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My initial reaction, when Overture went down, was “So what!”

And I feel pretty much the same now it is back. I was getting tired of weeding out so many unusable keywords. Not that the alternate database is faultless, but there are far less obvious bad searches, and the results are definitely more up-to-date - vital if you are building sites for tomorrow, rather than yesterday.

There is a quick way to weed out suspect keywords - very important irrespective of which database, or even which keyword research tool you use.

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It has been available since August 2007. Until recently, it has been possible to use Overture alongside the alternate database. In fact I was planning an article comparing the two, but now I will focus on what you need to do to get the new database working, as it is not yet covered in the otherwise comprehensive user manual.

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Many of you will have experienced recent problems with Niche Inspector not returning Overture data.

Personally, I was placing less and less reliance on Overture data, which has not been updated for many months. After Overture transferred to Yahoo, they announced that the tool would be phased out, and it appears that this has now happened.

Niche Inspector is one of the few tools that foresaw this problem and did something about it. The author, Myleena Phan, has just told me about her plans with respect to Overture problems.

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Niche Inspector is not returning Overture keywords at the moment. This is not directly a problem with Niche Inspector. It is the Overture service that is returning No suggestions for key phrase.

Niche Inspector support are aware of this, so bombarding them with support tickets will not help. I have found Niche Inspector support to be very responsive, so I ask you to be patient. As soon as I hear something, I will let you know.

Niche Inspector still works fine with the alternative database that has been included recently. Just change your Settings - Research Options - Monthly Searches from Overture to Alternate database.

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I have just released a niche software update to my Niche Inspector Strategy Tool.
This makes ranking your best niche keywords even easier. It is now more flexible, so you can match your rankings to your site objectives.

Updating should be a simple process, except that Google has introduced a 1000 cell copy limit on it’s spreadsheets. I have not heard back from Google yet if this is a permanent limit.

You have 2 choices:

1. Use a spreadsheet program such as OpenOffice, or MS Office
2. Copy and paste from a Google spreadsheet 62 rows at a time

If you have a fairly tight niche, with less than 200 keywords, then option 2 is quite easy, and should not need much more explanation. Just open your exported Niche Inspector data in Google Spreadsheets, then copy 62 rows at a time into my niche software tool. You may find it easier to keep track of where you are if you copy and paste 60 row blocks.

Option 1 is also very easy, but it does require that you have a spreadsheet program installed on your computer. OpenOffice is free, and easy to install from www.openoffice.org. If you use a spreadsheet, then most ask you for a starting row when you import a CSV. Make your life alittle easier by starting at Row 2 - you do not want the Niche Inspector Data headers because they are already in my Niche Strategy Tool.

Improved Keyword Ranking

Once you’ve got your data into my niche software, you now have more options for ranking.

One ranking feature that wasn’t clear in the original version is that it is best to chose your CPC ranking and sort by it before you paste the data. Niche Inspector sorts by maximum CPC bid to give you the best idea of where advertisers are spending money. Once this gets into the Niche Strategy Tool, it becomes alphanumeric, with fairly useless sorting capability.

You can decide all your other Ranking options once you’ve transferred the data.

The big changes are:

1. Ranking lists are now within the tool - no need to type your own rankings in. Just copy and paste.
2. You can weight different factors by applying more rank points to some factors that others.

This second new feature lets you prioritize your niche keywords much closer to your site objectives. If a quick start is important, give more weighting to KEI. If you want a consistently performing AdSense site, give more weighting to Number Of Google Advertisers. If you’re not sure yet, just get started with the standard rankings - you can always come back and change them later.

If you need any help with this, or any other aspect of niche software, just ask me.

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A few days ago, a friend asked me, “Can you help give me ideas to improve on my traffic and to monetize?”
Today I realized how my reply was the basis of a fantastically easy niche strategy.
A simple way to harness the power of Niche Inspector to build a system for strategic website growth.
I have built a free niche strategy tool for you.

First, let me explain how I came to develop this free niche strategy tool, and how it works.

My friend’s site is based on a fairly tight niche activity, but I noticed related words, particularly for equipment required for that activity. By way of example, let’s assume that you are hooked on calculating. With today’s emphasis on fighting the effects of advancing years by exercising your brain, you might set up calculating-for-health.com (first person to do this can e-mail me for some publicity - let’s face it you will need all the help you can get)

So assuming the site was about calculating, I also researched calculate and calculator. Depending on the speed of the Internet, this takes from 5 to 15 minutes, my example took 9.2 minutes total, plus the time it took to type in the keywords. On my friends site, this gave me 300 keywords, but this niche is so tight that we only manage 205. If your heart is set on wasting your time in this niche, you might easily think of a few related keywords to add, including obvious misspellings that I will write about on another day.

Oops, I still had the settings on Germany (see my previous post). The demand and profitability did not look good enough to sustain a profitable site. They might in a US, or global market. If they do, remember where you got the idea.
Back to my story.

By sorting on the appropriate column headings, I quickly produced 4 lists of 20 keywords that meet different aspects of a good niche strategy. There is some overlap, but the combined list should give you enough topics to get a website big enough to get noticed.

In the example that follows, I have kept all the keywords in place. In real life, I would have deleted terms that did not fit in with my theme of calculating for health.

Niche Strategy To Exploit Maximum Revenue

Look for the big earners. What are advertisers paying for? A quick click on Niche Inspector’s Broad Match CPC button shows the top 10 to be:

1. student loan consolidation calculator
2. debt consolidation loan calculator
3. loan consolidation calculator
4. refinance mortgage rate calculator
5. mortgage refinance calculator
6. refinance calculator
7. retirement planning calculator
8. home equity loan calculator
9. calculator card consolidation debt credit
10. reverse mortgage calculator

In this case, most of the high earning clicks have several advertisers, but some only have a few. I have seen what happens when there are only a few advertisers. Their budgets soon get used up and you spend half a month displaying public service ads. We need a more diverse niche strategy.

Niche Strategy For Most Consistent Revenue

Look for popular advertising keywords. A quick click on Niche Inspector’s Number of Google Ads button shows the top 10 to be:

1. debt consolidation calculator
2. student loan consolidation calculator
3. debt consolidation loan calculator
4. home equity loan calculator
5. calculator card consolidation debt credit
6. mortgage refinance calculator
7. debt calculator
8. mortgage rate calculator
9. retirement calculator
10. refinance calculator

As you see, a few overlaps, but I’ll cover this later. Before that, there are another couple of aspects to our niche strategy that generate two more lists.

Niche Strategy For Maximum Traffic

Look for high search volume keywords. A quick click on Niche Inspector’s Searches button shows the top 10 to be:

1. mortgage calculator
2. calculator
3. loan calculator
4. love calculator
5. bmi calculator
6. online calculator
7. auto loan calculator
8. ovulation calculator
9. tax calculator
10. pregnancy calculator

These high volume search terms form our main longterm targets. On our website, they will often form the Tier 2 pages, or Main Categories, depending on how we build our website. This is really a topic for at least one separate article (send me a message if you can’t wait). To complement them, we need some short term topics that will get us started quickly.

Niche Strategy For Quick Easy Traffic

Look for keywords with high search:results ratio. Though Niche Inspector includes this simple ratio, it is better to use a demand weighted ratio called KEI. If you don’t know what KEI means, I will explain it better in a future article. If you do know about KEI, e.g. from WordTracker, don’t get too excited about the big numbers - they are due to me using the allintitle command, which I will explain in a separate article. A quick click on Niche Inspector’s KEI button shows the top 10 to be:

1. formula to calculate mortgage payment
2. weight watcher point calculator
3. due date calculator
4. weight watcher online point calculator
5. calculate chess tactic
6. calculate child support payment
7. calculate due date for pregnancy
8. calculating square foot
9. mortgage calculator
10. car payment calculator

How Do 4 Lists Make A Niche Strategy?

To build a workable niche strategy, you need a system. 4 lists do not a niche strategy make, so let us build a proper working model. With a few simple clicks, the Niche Inspector Keyword data is transformed into a niche strategy spreadsheet.

After opening Niche Inspector’s CSV output in Google Spreadsheets, I added some ranking and other columns. The extra columns are:

Notes

Just a spare column for you to add some notes

CPC Rank

After sorting by column U (descending CPC) I numbered the top 100 in descending order. If you need help preparing a copy and paste list, or any other aspect of Google Spreadsheets, just ask. You can sort by other CPC columns and vary the number of keywords you rank. I just picked 100 out of thin air - there is no significance.

Ads Rank

All these ranking numbers are prepared the same way, by pasting (or typing if you like spending time on the number pad) in the 100 to 1 number list. Before you do this one, sort Column T (number of Google Ads) in descending order)

Search Rank

Sort by column J (Searches) before pasting in your 100-1 list as above.

KEI Rank

Sort by column L (Google KEI) before pasting in your 100-1 list as above. There are actually some good reason why to choose some of the other columns, K to S, at this stage. Remind me to write a separate article on this some time.

Total Rank

This helps you to prioritize which keywords to write about first. The unranked ones may have some value, but by the time you have written 193 pages, your content will probably being driven by your visitors anyway.

Date Done

To help you keep track of where you are, after you have published a page, type the date in this column. Before you do this, it is a good idea to click File - Spreadsheet Settings and choose your country, which sets an appropriate date format.

URL

When you set the date, as above, you can also paste the URL here. Sometimes, I make more than one page for a keyphrase, with words in a different order, or pluralized, or slightly different in some other way. In which case, I leave the Date Done blank until I have published all the pages.

Your Own Niche Strategy Tool

You can view the published version of this Niche Strategy Tool. This online document is completely free, but limited by it’s static nature.

If you want to play around with the dynamic Google Spreadsheet, send me a message via my Contact Page, and I will add you as a collaborator. This will allow you to play around with the figures in the model, or if you are a Niche Inspector owner, you can paste in your own keyword data. In either case, you simply save your own private version of the spreadsheet and you have your own prioritized site plan.

If you want me to do your keyword research and build a model based on your own site concept, it’s $20 for your own 3 keywords. If you do not have a clue where to start, I will even find a niche for you.

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Yesterday I realized how benefits continue with Niche Inspector in the long tail. As a website builder, I have to break off researching new niche markets with Niche Inspector to look after my existing websites. Then I realized yesterday that I should always keep it to hand - it can help me build old as well as new sites.

Anyone familiar with long tail marketing knows how soon websites can stray away from the keyword into related topics. If you don’t know about the long tail, let me know and I’ll write a short but compelling explanatory note.

When reviewing my earnings on an established site, I noticed a particular page performing better than average for the site. This website is not particularly profitable - I researched it before Niche Inspector was available. Anyway, it’s a health website and I continue with it for reasons other than profit, but even so it needs to pay its way.

Now this page is focused on a particular health treatment, which is predominant in the field. As well as above average eCPM I noticed it was popular with search engine traffic. It was an obvious target for one or two additional pages.

Yup, you’ve guessed it. Over to Niche Inspector, a minute on the analysis and hey presto, 3 new page topics with potential returns, though not brilliant, well above average for the site. Now I keep the program open all the time - I need Niche Inspector in the long tail.

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Yesterday, I described how niche marketing database software, Niche Inspector, pulls search volume data (demand) into it’s database. Today, I concentrate on the supply data it draws from several sources to assess your potential competition. I look at how you can tweak different filters to find niches that match your business goals.

This is why I said goal setting is so important - you need to know how you feel about writing lots of pages to target many mid value keywords, or a few pages targeting high value keywords. Of course, you can simply follow the examples given in the free niche keyword report, but then you’ll be running your business with someone else’s goals, and you might not be quite as successful.

The niche marketing database software displays supply data for Google, Yahoo and Windows Live (MSN), so you need to decide whether to filter on all of these or just focus on one or two. Your second decision is whether to look at pure supply, i.e. the number of competitors, or a ratio of demand over supply, or the slightly more complicated but highly regarded KEI. Don’t worry if this sounds too complicated. The slick interface that allows you to quickly switch between each view means you’ll understand the differences almost immediately - certainly quicker than any explanation I could give.

Now you are ready to filter for niches where it will be easiest to gain traffic. Do it now if you want to, but personally I would wait until you’ve explored the profitability data, which I’ll be discussing next time.

By the way, if you are using a spreadsheet to analyze your data as described in the free niche marketing database software report, and you’re stuck on the formulas, please contact me for help. I wasn’t BP’s highest paid spreadsheet programmer for nothing.

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Niche Inspector, at it’s simplest, is a quick way of doing niche market research with an approach that lets you uncover hundreds of hidden niches that other methods miss. Looking deeper, it has many features that let you control how you filter the potential niches it finds. Today, I look at its basic data collection process and especially the demand component.

Niche Inspector adopts a simple approach to searching for potential niche markets. You point it in the right direction, and it will go and collect related demand, competition and potential profit data in a grid with every search, sort, and filter option you will ever need. If you don’t know what direction to send it in, it will even go off and find it’s own suggestions.

It does this quicker than any comparative tool that I’ve ever used. Results normally come back immediately, but even when there are those inevitable delays you get querying live data over the internet, you can always see where you are. Rather than a silly message or useless moving timer, you can see real live data appearing, which you can start to review through the unique multi-threaded interface.

Niche Inspector Demand

By default, Niche Inspector fetches demand from Overture. Critics argue that Overture is buggy and inferior to WordTracker, but you can easily add WordTracker data if you want. In my experience, it is much better to be able to quickly focus on potential high demand markets than waste time arguing about the merits of one version against another. Remember, demand is only one factor and it will change over time. Worrying too much about whether demand is truly 10,000 or 8,500 is pointless. I like the Niche Inspector way, and it works - quickly dismissing ideas with too little demand, and quickly saving potential niches as new projects.

Of course, if Niche Inspector only helped you build a database of high demand keywords, it would not be worth much consideration. It’s a great start though, and leads seamlessly into the all important filtering options that I cover in my Free Using Niche Inspector Tips.

If you have any questions about using Niche Inspector, please comment below or on my Contact Page. Remember, most questions about how and why using Niche Inspector works so well are answered in the Free Niche Keyword Report.

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