Tony's Thing on the Web

Back in mid January this year I wrote a item called Niche Products Monthly - Hasn't Found a Niche, in which I showed how and why the products being offered, could not by definition, be classed as being in a Niche.

Since Niche Products Monthly is new, I decided to give them a fair chance and wait to see if the 2nd month’s product offerings were better Niche Products. The 3 products for February were on Bass Fishing, eBay Power Selling and an Insiders Guide to Real Estate.

As with the previous months niche products these three come with a ready made easy to upload website, 50 Private Label Articles, an ebook, Ready made PPC Ads for Google and Overture and Autoresponder course and around 1000 keyword phrases all related to each niche.

 

No Real Keyword Data

My previously reported criticism was that the supplied keywords came with no supporting data like Demand or Supply. By this I mean the number of searches on each phrase and the number of other web pages targeting the same keyphrases.

I was not alone in voicing my concerns about this, as was evident from other comments on the Niche Monthly Forum. However in the 2nd months batch of products the keywords still come with no competitive data.

Just as before I have to seriously question why this should be, since these keywords are supposed to be collected using the widely accepted Wordtracker service used by many for keyword research. Wordtracker does not supply keywords without competitive data, so why would Niche Products Monthly not supply this data ?

Could it be that if they did supply competitive data that it would be quickly obvious to everyone that these products being offered are not in a Niche.

 

Let's take Bass Fishing, we all know fishing, even if you're not an angler yourself, is extremely popular and has many keen enthusiastic followers who spend money on their pastime. So this market has a keen group of followers who spend lots of money on learning about fishing and buying fishing tackle and accessories.

So there's certainly a market for fishing products and it could be argued that Bass fishing is a Niche market within the larger market of fishing.

But if we relate marketing to fishing, there is no point in having a large pond of hungry prospects (fish) if you don't have the means to reach them.

Simply putting up a ready made web site does not mean it will ever be seen by your prospects (fish). The point about having a Niche Market and a Niche Product is that you need to fish in a small pond, that has enough hungry prospects (fish) willing and having the money to buy your product and they are in a pond you can reach.

 

Offering a product on Bass Fishing satisfies all these aspects of being in a Niche only if you can reach the hungry prospects (fish).

 

Keyword Research
So, I did the keyword research on the keyword list supplied with this Niche Monthly Product. You also need to keep in mind that even with competitive data on a niche market, it still doesn't tell you what chance you have of competing in that niche. You can see the other factors I consider in my keyword research at: website optimization and keyword discovery

However, here are some of the key results:

For the exact search phrase " bass fishing " there were over 22,000 searches/month on Overture. So there are lots of fish, even if Overture over estimates them, but that's another story. However there are over 4.2 million others trying to catch the same fish, as shown by the number of other web pages targeting this exact phrase.

If we dig deeper to a niche within a niche (sub niche) then we come up with " largemouth bass " which is in fact mentioned in the ebook that's part of this Niche Products Monthly offering. Whilst there are still over 4,400 searches for " large mouth bass " there are still too many other anglers looking to fish in the same pond, namely over 984,000.

Slightly better is " large mouth bass " with over 1,100 fish but still 147,000 other anglers.

" small mouth bass " doesn't fair any better with over 727,000 other anglers and 1,700 fish.

A niche pond that does look reachable is " bass fishing lure " 1,800 fish; 26,800 other anglers or " bass fishing tips " over 1,700 fish and only 80,600 other anglers.

The product ebook supplied is too general to appeal to someone looking for specifics about bass fishing lures so perhaps we are left with bass fishing tips. Yes the ebook does cover some tips but even I can tell (and I'm not into fishing) that it's very beginner's stuff in the ebook.

Let's face it these types of ebooks are written by ghost writers hired from elance.com or the like and the author probably knows nothing about fishing let alone bass fishing. So will anyone buy such a general ebook from an unknown author, or are they more likely to buy from an author who has actually done some fishing.

I mentioned that each niche product comes with ready made ads for Google and Overture so just in case you can't get the ready made web site high enough in the natural search engine listings you can start using PPC to get traffic to your web site.

 

Getting a Natural Search Listing
Of course getting a natural search engine listing high enough to be found assumes you can get the site past the duplicate content filters that the major search engines have. So if you put up the exact same website as 100's of other people you'll have a problem from the duplicate content filters.

I did a quick check to find how many sites existed were using last months niche products. Whilst the most I managed to find was 35, only 2 of those appeared in Google's search results and that clearly shows how effective Google now is in filtering out duplicate content.

 

PPC and CPC
I also looked at the Cost Per Click (CPC) for the top search terms, those with enough traffic to make it worthwhile and there was only 50 out of the 1000 supplied. The highest CPC was $6.94 for the No 1 slot, " smallmouth bass " came in at $1.66 with " bass fishing tip/s " at $1.10 to $0.44.

Getting traffic through PPC for a $27 ebook is very much border line in being cost effective. If the site conversion rate is 1 in 100 (typical) you will only earn any money if the CPC is less than $0.27.

I won't waste my time or yours giving you a similar breakdown on the other two Niche Monthly Products for February but it seems clear at least to me that Niche Products Monthly - Still has no Niche or at least not one anyone can reach that is cost effective.

If anyone using these products would like to leave a comment on this blog that they have done well with them I would be happy to be able to report it.

Until then

Tony Simpson
web site optimisation
Making Your Website Work for You