In my previous post, How to Generate Ideas on What to Sell Online, I explored the various idea sources of possible product niches. Looking at what people bought, talked about, asked about or researched on, pretty much sparks off your imagination on how you can fulfill their needs.

Now that you have an entire list of product ideas, your next step is sieve out those with too much competition. Essentially, the key to a successful online product is the specific KEYWORDS used and optimized in a blog, sales page or website. The strategy here is to find niche keywords with some volume of searches and low competition from other websites, especially web 2.0 websites.

How do we do this?

I learnt this from watching videos from the Thirty Day Challenge, a free program that attempts to help new internet marketers make their first $10 online.

Now, with the list of products that you have, brainstorm on key phrases users would use to target a specific niche area. For instance, under the umbrella of Beauty, you will have niche areas such as hair color, hair braiding, how to look beautiful,Hollywood makeup secrets, how to cut hair and stylish hair styles.

Wordtracker

Next, run a search through Wordtracker (http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com) on the key phrases you have picked out. Look for phrases with searches totaling 80 to 100 a day. Note: As Wordtracker may be inaccurate at times, you need to cross check these numbers with Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends).

The challenge here is this – Google Trends does not provide specific numerical information like Wordtracker. What is shown is a chart that depicts the search TREND for the keyword you are looking at. The good news is that we are still able to ESTIMATE the number of searches for a keyword by comparing this with another keyword which we know the numerical search volume of.

How is it done in the Thirty Day Challenge?

In the Thirty Day Challenge, the keyword “Male Yeast Infection” is known to have a daily search volume of approximately 500. (The people at the Thirty Day Challenge have a website optimized for “Male Yeast Infection” with a 2nd ranking for this keyword.) Therefore, when another phrase is compared to “Male Yeast Infection”, we can estimate the search volume by looking at the length of the bar chart for your keyword, as compared to the bar chart for “Male Yeast Infection”. For instance, a bar line that is approximately 1/5 of the length of the one for “Male Yeast Infections” can be estimated to have a daily search volume of about 100 searches. One more thing – when doing this comparison, remember to use quotes (“) on your keyword to indicate matches for exact keywords.

The other criteria used to shortlist keywords would be the number of competing pages that are listed in the search engine. The gurus at the Thirty Day Challenge recommend that only unique keywords (that means with quotes when running a search on Google), with 30000 or less sites returned would be considered viable niche keywords to work with. With the lower competition for these very niche keywords, it would then be easier for you to get top search engine rankings.

One final thing you need to notice on the search engine results is the number of Web 2.0 sites (such as blogs, weblogs, squidoo or ezine article sites) you see listed in the search results. The general contention here is that, the greater the number of Web 2.0 sites listed, the more difficult it will be to optimize your keyword.