Take Your Marketing Niche For A Test Drive

This strategy has been used in PPC for some time, however it's outlined very well in the book The Four Hour WorkWeek by Tim Ferris.

Once you have selected a new niche that you may be 1st in, you need to test the niche to see if it delivers enough revenue to make some effort worthwhile. You can test a niche efficiently by employing PPC, like Google Adwords.

A lot of SEOs do not use PPC, but they're missing a tool that may save them a lot of time and effort.

Start a short Adwords campaign focusing on the keyword terms that relate to your niche. You can only need to do it for maybe two weeks, and it shouldn't cost you more that about a hundred dollars. The target is to respond to the question : "do folks who look for the keywords want to buy what I am offering?".

Make sure your website has a clear call to action which will help you measure exact buyer interest. As an example, a sign-up form offering more info, a sales inquiry, or an actual purchase . You do not need to have your site finished to do that. A basic 3 page site will do.

Monitor the campaign and do split / run testing on the ad-copy. This suggests you compare one set of wording against another. Helpfully, Google Adwords has this functionality as a built in feature, and they supply a free service called Google Optimizer if you need to test your page copy.

Again, this exercise can be as easy or complex as you need to make it.

Start off straightforward, and change the wording to make the offer sound more interesting, and take a note of the wording that gives the most return. You can use this wording in your title tags during your SEO campaign. The wording that gets a click in Adwords is also sure to get a click in the organic listings.

If visitors are on the lookout for your keyword, clicking on your ad, and moving to desired action, then you've got a working niche. Remember, the general public will click the organic results instead of Adwords listings, so that the fact you're getting click-through further demonstrates that there is little competition in your chosen niche in the organic results.

If you aren't getting click thru and / or sign-up / purchase, try the same strategy, but with different keyword terms. Keep going until you find a winner.

It's a lot less expensive re time, effort and money to check keywords at that point, rather than commit to a brand and an SEO method that targets the incorrect keyword terms, and the incorrect niche.

Choose a trading name, and domain name, that may be used generically, and, if possible, aligned with your keyword term.

One approach is to take a simple keyword phrase folk are familiar with, and will search for, and mix it with something else. For example, SEOBook, AfterMail, FaceBook, HotelFind, and so on. This approach works really well if you don't have a huge budget for brand building.

Non-descriptive brand names, such as Kellogs, or Mooch, do not work so well for SEO, particularly for low profile firms, because folk need to know your name before they search for you.

So take your niche for a spin and see where it takes you.