In the article, How to Fail at Online Business – Neglect Niche Marketing, he explains why franchise businesses and MLM schemes fail on the Internet due to (1) competition and (2) fewer geographical market limitations.

According to Dr. Wilson, the answer is in researching and clearly defining a market niche with sufficient demand but without overwhelming competition. Nichification is the key.

Read the article on the Web Marketing Today website: How to Fail at Online Business – Neglect Niche Marketing

What’s in it for you?

Faster response to your requests, because the browser doesn’t reload the entire page, but only receives the information that was changed.

For example, when looking for a niche, you usually reload the Niche Generator page over and over again until you find a niche you like. With the new technology, it works much faster, because you don’t have to wait while the entire page reloads. You get another niche suggestion in a moment.

Tested with IE, Firefox and Opera. Let me know if it doesn’t work in your browser.

– Andrei

You can use this tool with your keyword research to determine whether the area you want to go into is a momentary fluctuation or one with a constant history. You can also compare two terms, which helps you figure out pockets of information within a specific niche.

Let’s pick two random niches, such as ‘payroll software’ and ‘carpet cleaning’, and compare them in Google Trends. You can compare up to five terms by separating each term with a comma. To access Google Trends from the VRE Toolbar, type your keywords into the toolbar’s search box and select Keywords > Google Trends.

You can see from the graphs, that the carpet cleaning market (red graph) was quite stable over the past two years, and it’s search activity usually goes up during the first half of the year with peaks in each August.

The payroll software market graph (blue) is smoother, but it’s slowly descending over the years. Although, it still receives enough search volume, it is, probably, not a good choice for niche site building in the long term.

Another piece of valuable information, that we can get from Google Trends, is the top cities, regions, and languages for our keywords. You can see that the top five cities interested in ‘payroll software’ are cities in India, where the software development market is on the rise. The interest in this term is far less in U.S. market.

What other functionality is available?

From About Google Trends:

To see how many searches contained either of two terms, just separate those terms with a vertical bar: “|”. For example, to determine how many searches contained the terms “mittens” or “gloves,” you’d enter mittens | gloves. To compare multi-word terms, use parentheses. To see how many searches were done for either “winter mittens” or “gloves,” for instance, enter (winter mittens) | gloves; otherwise, your query will be interpreted to mean all searches for “winter mittens” or “winter gloves.”

You can also exclude terms from your search by using the minus sign. To see how many searches contained the term “maps” but not “google,” for instance, just enter maps -google.

To restrict your results to only those searches that contain your terms in the specific order you’ve entered them, put your terms in quotation marks. (By default, Google Trends will show you all searches that contain the terms you entered in any order.)

To use Google Trends from the VRE Toolbar, type your keywords into the toolbar’s search box and select Keywords > Google Trends.

Privacy note: The VRE Toolbar collects anonymous statistical usage data but it DOES NOT spy on your browsing habits. It does not track webpages you visit or keywords you use in the search box. Please see our Privacy policy.

1. Keywords Suggestions & Research
   Grabs the Overture search counts for different geographic markets. Offers suggested monthly regional search volumes by market for Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Provides links to price estimate tools from Overture and Google AdWords.
2. Niche Generator
   Randomly suggests niche topics. Provides links to keyword research and domain lookup.
3. 43 Things
   Lists other people’s goals related to a keyword. Helps discover people’s interests, that can give you great ideas to create websites around.
4. Adwords Traffic Estimator
   Gives you keyword traffic and cost estimates at a glance. For any keywords you select, you’ll see the following information: minimum bid, maximum cost-per-click (CPC), search volume, estimated avg. CPC, estimated ad positions, traffic estimates based on an unlimited budget.
5. ColorImpact
   This software allows to create beautiful color schemes for your website with a single click.
6. DomainsBot Ideas, Suggestions
   Helps find great domain names.
7. DigitalPoint (Wordtracker)
   Shows the results of your query from both Wordtracker and Overture for determining which phrases are searched most often. Gives suggestions for alternate (but similar) keywords.
8. Rapid Niche Websites
   Quickly create cash-pulling web sites by following this easy step-by-step system.
9. Google Sets
   Automatically create sets of items from a few examples. For example, when you enter ‘armani, versace’ subset, it returns Gucci, Chanel, Prada, Calvin Klein, Fendi, Dolce Gabbana etc. Fun and very addictive!
10. The Reese Report
    A highly regarded monthly publication (a printed newsletter & companion CD-ROM) that demonstrates and teaches tons of little-known online moneymaking strategies, provides techniques and methods you can use today to start building an online empire made up of tons of tiny content sites.

What’s your favorite tool?

Let me show you how to organize your virtual real estate empire with a beta tool from Microsoft Research Group. You’ll know how to structure your network of niche websites, and how you can easily find out your niche neighbourhood or related themes.

The secret tool we will be using is called MSRA SRC. MSRA stands for Microsoft Research, Asia. It’s the research group that developed the tool. And SRC stands for Search Result Clustering. It’s a technology to on-the-fly cluster search results into different groups, and provide meaningful and readable names for these groups. To access the tool from the VRE Toolbar, enter your keywords in the toolbar’s search box and click Ideas > MSRA Clustering.

Let’s pick some niche to explore it’s related themes. The Random Niche Generator suggested ‘Picnic Tables’ niche for this article. Type picnic tables in the toolbar’s search box and select Ideas > MSRA Clustering.

If you don’t have the VRE Toolbar, you can access this tool here: MSRA Search Results Cluctering. Note, that it works better in IE. For example, expanding/collapsing of groups doesn’t work in Firefox browser.

Take a look at the results in the left side frame called Result Map:

Let’s group the results slightly differently. We want to separate them into two groups. We’ll put those that contain ‘picnic tables’ in the first group. This is what our main website will be about.

picnic tables
wood picnic tables
cedar picnic tables
recycled plastic picnic tables
folding picnic tables
concrete picnic tables
round picnic tables
octagon picnic tables

The remaining key phrases give us some ideas about what related websites we can build around our main site:

outdoor furniture
park benches
picnic benches
patio furniture
plastic lumber
picnic baskets
adirondack chairs
chaise lounge

Each of these phrases is a related topic to build another website. When you’ve built your main website, you just type a related phrase in the toolbar’s search box and click Ideas > MSRA Clustering again to get start it over for your next site. For example, one of the related topics for ‘picnic tables’ is ‘picnic baskets’:

And that’s not all! There is the right frame of the search results. When you click on the term in the left frame, the right frame shows websites related to the term. You can visit them for more information about your niche, to exchange links, submit articles and setup joint ventures with them.

It’s easy to organize your virtual real estate empire with the VRE Toolbar and Microsoft Search Result Clustering.

Now it’s your turn. Type your niche theme in the search box and click Ideas > MSRA Clustering. Take Action!

P.S. The term VRE Empire was coined by John Reese. You can read more about VRE Planning and Stategy in the May 2006 issue of The Reese Report.

43 Things is one of the most popular resources among the Virtual Real Estate Toolbar users.  It helps to find out what people want related to your keywords. It allows you  to search for goals documented by their users.

For instance, let’s go to the Niche Generator and pick a random niche theme (select Ideas > Niche Generator from the toolbar). I just did that, and  got Jacuzzi Hot Tubs.

Let’s look what people want related to jacuzzi hot tubs. I’m selecting the words Jacuzzi Hot Tubs, then  dragging and dropping them into the toolbar’s search box. Now I’m selecting Ideas> 43 Things (Goals).

If you used the 43 Things  tool from the toolbar before, you’ll notice that it works slightly differently  now. It doesn’t redirect you to the 43 Things website.  It now  gets the  goals list  from the source and displays  it on our  website instead. This allowed us to link each goal  right to the Keyword Research Tool, so that we could analize the goal phrase with one click.

Here are some examples of what I got for ‘jacuzzi hot tubs’:

buy a hot tub
own a hot tub
get a hot tub
build a hot tub
soak in a hot tub
get my hot tub working
get a hot tub for the basement
put a hot tub in my apartment
buy a hot tub/spa/jacuzzi
have a hot tub
relax in a hot tub, and even…
make love in a hot tub

This tool tells you what goals  people set. Now it’s your turn. Help them to achieve what they want with your network of niche websites.

If you like the suggestion, there are quick links to the keyword research tool and the domain suggestions page.

If you don’t like it, just hit Refresh (F5 in most browsers) to get another one.

The Random Niche Generator is available from the Virtual Real Estate Toolbar. To quickly access it from the toolbar, select Ideas > Niche Generator.

You can see some websites ask to register to send you one niche a day. Others overload the page with Adsense ads, and you have to wait some time while it reloads.

Our Random Niche Generator is completely free, no registration required, and there are no Adsense ads on the page, therefore it loads much faster.

Have any ideas how to make this tool even better? Post your comment here.

– Andrei