"In the Money Spinners column you have discussed about the principles that would help us create profitable online businesses. The ideas are useful. But, I am a lazy duck. Instead of trying to make me think, please make me actually do something tangible and discover a profitable online project," Babu grinned sheepishly.
"That's not a problem. A business person will be successful in his project only if he sells what others want to buy. In offline projects, you need to spend millions of rupees in market research to find out the market trend. In the case of online projects, there are some ways do this market research without losing your sleep over the expenses," I said and Babu was all smiles. "That's what I would like to hear from you," he said.
"There are many online service providers that track online activities of the Internet users. They analyse millions of keywords that people use on the search engines and create a database of search patterns. If you read these search patterns you will understand the current and emerging trends," I told Babu. "Can you please explain the methodology using one of such online service providers as an example?" Babu asked me.
"Yes," I said. "WordTracker website compiles a database of terms that people search for. You enter some keywords, and it tells you how often people search for them, and also tells you how many competing sites use those keywords. WordTracker helps you find all keyword combinations that bear any relation to your business, service or product - many of which you might never have considered."
"But," Babu interrupted me, "I have no idea about what I will do."
I said, "First of all you must think about your interests. It will help you identify a few subjects that appeal to you. Consider these subjects as your future businesses and then use WordTracker to find out whether they are worth carrying on. Have you ever thought about your interests? What is that thing for which you will not mind giving your life?"
"I am fond of all types of outdoor sports. I love golf, " replied Babu. "Then let us say you want to start a sports related business and concentrate on golf. We will proceed to do our research on golf. If we get a negative report, we can think of something else," I said. Babu nodded his head.
"Sign up for a free WordTracker trial to use its features. If you don't mind spending Rs.300, you can sign up for one day subscription and access all features. After you sign up, enter the term golf in the WordTracker keyword box. WordTracker will use your term to search two major search engines, then visit similar sites to pull a total of 300 keywords from those sites' meta tags. You started with golf, and WordTracker now suggests clubs, putter, and hundreds of other golf-related terms," I told him and continued, "WordTracker uses its database of over 300 million searches over the last 90 days to find the popularity of the term you picked. Look at this information and see that the term putters has been typed into the search engines 300 times over the last 90 days. When WordTracker searches its databases for you, it finds some terms that are useful to you and others that are not. You have to select which words are most appropriate. WordTracker allows you to assess the value of the keywords you have selected in the leading search engines. Find the balance between the total number of competing Web pages for each search engine and the popularity of the search term. Then target the niches. If we target putters, which has one million Web pages in Google competing for 42 searches every 24 hours, we will not be successful. However as we can see from the results shown there are far better terms to target. Take kid putters. This has 25 searches every 24 hours but only 22 competing web pages in Google. Perhaps you can think of starting a golf website for kids. Further research will give a clear picture. There are hundreds of such niche phrases you could target."
"Now I understand the process," Babu said with excitement.
He spent the following three days in keyword research, zeroed on his niche and started his sports related online business. Within three months he was able to generate an income of Rs.5,000 a month working from home.
Now he is doing research to start a few more websites on different subjects and multiply his income.