When deciding on a money making niche for their new websites, many publishers don't use their personal interests to influence their choice. Instead, they try to find topics that are highly searched in the search engines. The higher the search count for a particular phrase, the greater the potential for staggering amounts of traffic to arrive at your site if you can rank #1 for that phrase. And of course traffic = money. The more traffic disembarking on your site and taking a look around, the more adsense clicks you'll get, the more sales you will make and the more subscriptions you'll receive. Finding a popular niche is the goal, and the number of searches that are performed in a search engine is a good indication of this popularity. Enter keyword research tools. Keyword research tools are but one tool in our  niche finding arsenal. Let's explore this and other methods now.

Keyword Research Tools

Keyword research tools give you the number of times a particular phrase was searched for in the search engines over a particular period of time. Whilst keyword research tools are very useful, the problem with using them is that you have to start with a seed phrase. Search counts are returned for that seed phrase and related phrases too. For example, you'll start with a seed phrase like "baby shower" and the keyword research tool will return a search count for that phrase and also suggest related phrases like:

• baby shower games
• baby shower invitations
• etc

However, you are always limited to the scope of that seed phrase. If you don't care about any niche in particular and are only interested in high search counts, finding popular search phrases involves a great deal of luck. Unless you buy a top search term report, that is.

Top Search Term Reports

A top search term report lists the most highly searched terms in the last 12 months. The list is ordered by descending search sequence, meaning that the most highly searched phrases appear at the top. This is invaluable data if you don't care so much about the niche, but just want to focus on very popular topics. Keyword Discovery provide top search term reports that report anywhere between 10,000 and 500,000 terms. The more terms you want, the higher the price. But just think about how long it would take to trawl through even the smallest report of 10,000 terms. You would need to either develop a strategy for filtering out results you weren't interested in, or bite the bullet and inspect every single term.

Note: usually the terms that appear at the top of such reports are generic one word terms like "poker", "sex" and "casino" that you don't stand a chance of ranking for without the help of magic. We'll be exploring the use of magic for search engine rankings in a later article. For now, forget "sex".

Monitor Freelancer Boards

There are several websites on which project holders post work for the public to bid on. Such websites include rentacoder, getafreelancer, elance and guru. Some projects require the writing of keyworded articles for SEO. The fact that these articles need to be peppered with selected keywords suggests that the project holder has already done some keyword research and knows that their chosen keywords are in hot demand. Some are not so careful as to only disclose said keywords until the project is won, and flaunt them for all budding internet marketers (that means you!) to see. Those of questionable moral fibre will undoubtedly bid on those projects not disclosing keywords and request them. But I didn't put that idea in your head.

Use your judgement here. It could be that someone hears that "niche x" was going to be hot and then everyone else flocks like sheep after something that is never going to be. Remember "pink iphone"...?

I'm not suggesting that you go out and deliberately steal someone else's ideas here. What I am suggesting is that you keep your eyes and ears open, because there is a wealth of useful information all around you that you don't have to try too hard to get.

Ebay Pulse

Whilst Ebay Pulse provides an up to date list of the ten most popular searches, you can get a more detailed list of popular ebay searches here. Beware that you can lose whole days researching hot topics here, so try and keep track of time spent, especially as much of it will prove fruitless.

For those with a real interest in market research, Ebay provides market reports - gold dust for PHPBay Pro powered affiliate sites. You can buy market data reports, or if you have a degree of coding prowess, you can use API calls to retrieve your data.

The Unethical Way Of Finding Keyphrases

Caution: shockingly dirty tactics ahead.

Website sellers in the Sitepoint Marketplace post a smorgasbord of information related to the sites they are selling. Not only do they give away details of how they are making money with their site (thereby giving away their competitive advantage), but they often give access to their traffic statistics which reveal what search terms are bringing them traffic. This is like gold dust for people who can't be bothered to do their own keyword research. If those statistics are not freely given, dastardly internet marketers will pretend to be interested in buying the site and ask to be given access to the site's analytics data.

The information given by this traffic data differs from all other mentioned here in that this data relates to traffic that is currently landing on the site. Those keyphrases really are bringing in traffic right now, and you can see exactly how much.

The wise seller will exercise caution when giving away intimate details like these, as some people are only interested in replicating their success. They have no interest in buying.

We've Only Just Begun

Keyword research marks only the start of your journey towards pots of gold. What you do with those keywords is just as important. Stay tuned for our upcoming article on using magic to improve search engine rankings.