Niche Products Monthly - Hasn't Found A Niche
Jason Gazaway recently launched a new membership site called Niche Products Monthly, but does he know what a Niche really is ? Because all the first months products are clearly NOT in a Niche.
The stated aim of Niche Products Monthly is to provide its members with 3 Professionally produced Private Label Products per month targeted at a Niche Market.
It received heavy promotion from many well known names on the Internet, like John Delavera, David Vallieres, Keith Baxter and David Zohar to name but a few.
The first months niche products were:
A Beginner's Guide to Yoga
Quick and Easy Guide to Baby Showers
Wedding Savings Revealed
But what exactly is a Niche Product ? The simple definition is that a Niche is a highly targeted group. So, a Niche Product should be aimed at a highly targeted group of people interested in buying that product.
The Wikipedia Encyclopedia defines Niche marketing as the process of finding small but potentially profitable market segments and designing custom-made products or services for them.
I'll illustrate this with an example
Let's say I think there's a market for a Beginners Guide to playing a Guitar.
Do you think its been done already ? You bet it has and in a big way.
Then I decide to dig deeper and look at Guitar Picks (Google 5.4 million results), those small pieces of plastic or bone, that are used to pluck the strings, but it's still not targeted enough.
What about Custom Guitar Picks (1.3 million results on Google) or Handcrafted Guitar Picks (Google 63,500 results).
A quick check on Yahoo/Overture indicates a healthy number of searches on words related to guitar picks and with a few selected search variations I could easily assume more than 2,000 searches per month.
So Handcrafted Guitar Picks would be a niche product. It's in a highly targeted market that's small enough to be reachable with a website that does not have too much competition (63,500).
The results for Yahoo are similar with 57,800 search listings. It also has 4 Google Adwords Ads which shows there's a healthy market, but not too many Ads that would make it too competitive.
Now knowing what a Niche Market is and what a Niche Product should be, the question is:
Are a Beginner's Guide to Yoga, a Guide to Baby Showers, or an ebook about Wedding Savings, Niche Products in a Niche Market ?
Depending on how you search on Google or Yahoo for a Beginner's Guide to Yoga there are between 670,000 to 920,000 search results and on MSN 45,000.
Searching for a Guide to Baby Showers tops the scales at 3.6 million on Google, 7.9 million on Yahoo and a mere 270,000 on MSN. This is a lot of potential competition.
Keyword research on Overture shows the closest search phrase to be Yoga for Beginner which has around 4,000 searches per month, but over 2.2 million other competing web pages. So clearly it has way too much competition and would be virtually impossible to reach with a new website.
The Niche Products Monthly - A Beginner's Guide to Yoga is therefore not a product in a small Niche Market which is reachable with a new website.
So, does the Niche Products Monthly - A Quick and Easy Guide to Baby Showers fair any better as a niche product ?
The phrase 'baby shower guide' on Yahoo/Overture turns up over 3.1 million other competing pages and only 43 searches per month. Other related terms all have more than a million competing results and searches in double figures.
So once again this does not look very promising as a niche product.
The third product offering from Niche Products Monthly is Wedding Savings Revealed. Once again just a quick keyword research revealed terms related to saving money on a wedding all had high levels of competition (over 9 million) and low search demand (less than 170 searches per month).
Another product not really in a Niche.
Niche Products Monthly also supplies all the keyword search phrases they have researched for each product. Unfortunately they don't come with any data as to the number of searches on each term or the level of competing pages. Perhaps now I can see why.
Niche Products Monthly also supplies ready made websites for each one of these products that are aimed at selling the product ebook as well as having loads of pages of articles on related search terms. The idea behind this is to build Adsense earning websites.
The problem with this idea is that up to 750 other members of Niche Products Monthly could be putting up the same product websites using the same Duplicate Content. Google in particular has recently become very good at filtering out and de-indexing sites built using these types of automated programs.
So, the big question is how many members who put up these websites will get them indexed by the search engines ?
And how well are they likely to rank for search terms to be able to get enough traffic ?
These and many other questions will perhaps come to light in the member's forum, assuming of course they publish these sort of observations and comments. It's often the case that negative comments on these product forums are never published.
An update on Niche Products Monthly can be found at Niche Products Monthly - Still No Niche ?
Tony Simpson
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