Fortunately there are a number of very useful websites that you can use as part of your niche research process. I have compiled a list of 20 such sites which should make your niche research much easier in the future.

What Are People Currently Searching For?

One way to gauge whether a niche is popular or not is to use some of the analysis tools provided by the search engines. These sites all use live information directly from the search engines to determine which topics are being searched for the most.

• Google Hot Trends - This is a very useful site for finding out the top 100 topics that people are actively searching for on Google right now. It’s updated hourly and you can dig deeper into each topic to see related news, blog posts and web pages which gives you a clearer idea about why the topic is currently attracting so much attention.
• Yahoo! Buzz - This gives you a list of the top stories that people are currently interested in. There’s also a very useful Top Searches panel that is updated hourly with the top 10 searches on Yahoo!
• Lycos 50 - Another round of of top web searches. This site is updated weekly with the top 50 searches from Lycos.
• AOL Hot Searches - Shows you what is currently hot on AOL Search.

What Are People Currently Interested In?

Another way to gauge what is popular right now is to look what people are interested in reading about. These sites provide you with information about the top stories and blogs that people are reading.

• Digg - I’m fairly sure Digg needs no introduction, but it can be a very useful gauge in determining what people are interested in reading about.
• Technorati What’s Popular - This gives you a very useful breakdown of the top blogs, searches, videos and news stories from the blogosphere.

What Are People Buying?

Obviously for a niche to be profitable you need to be sure that there is a hungry crowd of buyers waiting to spend their money. The following sites give you an insight into what people are buying:

• eBay Pulse - This gives you a list of the top 10 things that people are searching for on eBay. Since eBay is one of the biggest marketplaces on the Internet you can be sure that anything listed here is currently something that a lot of people are interested in buying.
• eBay What’s Hot - Another useful resource from eBay where sales data is combined with information from trade magazines and predictions from industry experts to give you a list of some of the hottest products for the current season.
• Amazon Best Sellers - The most popular items on Amazon.com, updated on an hourly basis.
• Shopping.com Top Searches - This shows you the top 100 products in each of Shopping.com’s many categories to help you determine which products are hot right now. The information is updated every two weeks.
• mySimon Top Searches - Very similar to the Shopping.com site. This gives you details of the top searches performed by mySimon members in many different categories.

What Affiliate Programs Are Available?

In addition to looking at the trends of search engine users and online shoppers it can also be useful to look at affiliate program directories. These sites have many different products listed in a directory format. Examining both the categories that make up and directories and the products themselves can give you some good ideas for niches to consider. There are also very useful when you have already decided on a niche and would like to find a suitable affiliate program to promote.

• AssociatePrograms.com Affiliate Program DIrectory - This site has information on over 10,000 affiliate programs allowing you to easily research suitable affiliate products to promote to your niche market.
• AffiliatePrograms.com Affiliate Program Directory - This site is similar to the AssociatePrograms.com directory although there are not as many affiliate products listed here.
• AffiliateGuide.com - Another useful directory of affiliate programs.
• LifetimeCommissions.com - This directory lists affiliate programs that can pay you repeatedly, whether from recurring monthly fees or every time a customer buys a product from a merchant rather than just a one-off sale.
• ClickBank Marketplace - Allows you to search for information about digital products offered for sale on ClickBank.
• PayDotCom Marketplace - Another marketplace for digital products.

What Are People Reading About?

Another way to determine popular niches is to look what magazines are available. If there are several different magazines available for a given niche then there is a good chance that there will be a lot of people interested in products for sale within that niche.

• Magazines.com - A very useful site to help you find different magazines covering a variety of different topics.
• Amazon Magazine & Newspaper Subscriptions - A comprehensive directory of all magazines that can be subscribed to via Amazon.
• Google Catalogs - Allows you to search for catalogs that are available for viewing online. All available magazines are organized into a very useful directory allowing you to quickly find magazines relevant to your niche,

Now that you are armed with this list of niche research websites you should fine it much easier to research and select a niche. If there are any other websites that you use as part of your niche research feel free to share them by posting a comment below.

More Blog Posts About Niche Research

• Affiliates! - How to Pick a Niche You Can Really Sell To!
• Five Tips On Niche Research
• Niche Marketing Research is the Key!
• Why Niche Research & Competitive Analysis Are Essential To Online Success
• 10 Reasons for Niche Research - Know Your Market Or Crash & Burn

One of the most popular tools for keyword research is the Wordtracker free keyword suggestion tool. This allows you to enter your base keyword and returns a list of keyword suggestions along with the estimated number of daily searches.

One problem with this tool is that the search estimates are based on results from lesser known search engines rather than major search engines like Google. For more accurate results you could try using Wordtracker’s GTrends tool instead. What this does is come up with a list of keyword suggestion but uses Google Trends to calculate the number of estimated daily searches.

Now you might be thinking that Google Trends doesn’t provide you with the actual number of searches, just a graph of the keyword’s popularity over time. This is true but one thing you can do with Google Trends is to compare the graphs for two or more different keywords. If you have a keyword with a known amount of daily searches then you can use this as a baseline to estimate how many daily searches other keywords get by comparing the height of the lines on the graph.

The good news is that Wordtracker’s GTrends tool automates a lot of this for you. When you search for keyword suggestions you will notice that each suggested keyword has a little graph icon next to it. When you click on this you will get a popup window showing the Google Trends graph for the keyword along the the estimated number of visitors you should expect if you ranked #1 in Google for that keyword and the number of competing pages. The best keywords are those that return under 30,000 competing pages and have enough search volume to get over 100 hits daily.

One downside of Wordtracker’s tool is that you still need to go through and click on the icon for each keyword individually which can still be a time consuming task. Fortunately, software developer Janis Elsts have come up with an easy to use, inexpensive tool called GTrends SE that automates the process even further.

Once you’ve installed GTrends SE and the associated Firefox plugin all you need to do to research and analyse keywords is this:

1. Go to Wordtracker’s GTrends tool and get a list of suggested keywords.

2. Click a single button (provided by the Firefox plugin) to automatically send the list of suggested keywords to GTrends SE for analysis.

3. Let GTrends SE analyse the suggested keywords and tell you which are the best keywords to target.

That’s all there is to it.

Janis has deliberately chosen a low price point of GTrends SE so that the tool is accessible to almost everybody. This low price point coupled with the sheer convenience of being able to perform keyword research by clicking a single button and the hours of tedious, repetitive work that it will save you really do make this a must-have tool.

• TwitThis - This plugin places a ‘TwitThis’ button at the end of every post making it easy for your blog readers to share your posts on Twitter.
• WP YouTube - Makes it easy to embed YouTube videos in your posts like I did in my last post about Scoutle.
• Subscribe To Comments - Adds a check box to your comment forms allowing commenters to get automatic email notifications when further comments are posted. It’s a great way to encourage people to come back to your blog and keep the discussion going.
• Show Top Commentators - Allows you to display a list of your top commenters in the sidebar encouraging more discussion on your blog.
• SezWho - Installing this plugin fully integrates your blog with the SezWho community which allows readers to discover new blogs that they may be interested in, commenters to gain recognition for their contributions across different blogs by using universal profiles and site owners to attract more traffic and build a community of readers. Installing this plugin fully integrates your blog with the SezWho community.

If there are any plugins that you use and would recommend to other people go ahead and leave a comment.

More Blog Posts About WordPress Plugins:

• 35 (New) WordPress Plugins for an Effective Blogging Experience
• May 2008: WordPress Plugins Used On This Site
• WordPress Plugins That Add Value
• Top WordPress Plugins For The Smart Blogger
• A Must Have WordPress Plugins

Here is a short video explaining exactly how it works:

The advantage of using Scoutle is that everything is automated. All you really need to do is sign up, create your scouts and add them to your web page and then check back to see if they have met any other scouts that you are interested in.

If two users find each other sites interesting they can create a Connection. The more Connections you have the more points you will earn which in turn will mean more visitors.

There are also Networks that users can either join or start a new one of their own. The websites within a network are continually ranked allowing you to easily find the most appreciated sites for your niche.

Scoutle relies on people finding other websites interesting for them to get a high ranking so it should be difficult to manipulate and since most of the work is done for you there really is no reason not to try it out.

More Blog Posts About Scoutle:

• Scoutle: Automated Social Networking For Bloggers
• Playing with Scoutle
• Scoutle - Automated Social Network for Bloggers
• Blog Promotion With Automated Social Networking
• Automated Social Networking for Bloggers

Sean Lowery of MinisiteGraphics.com has designed websites for a number of top Internet Marketers and as such knows how to design a site that will sell. In additional to his bespoke professional design services Sean also runs a membership site called High Impact Templates where you can currently pick up 55 of Sean’s website templates for a very low $77.

The templates that are available to High Impact Templates members are all very well designed and cater for a number of different niches. Each template has a sales page layout, a squeeze page layout and a content page layout allowing you to easily build a full website from them.

If you’re in need of a great looking template for your website then you could do a lot worse than check out High Impact Templates.

Perhaps the most important reason for you to jump on the Twitter bandwagon is because so many other people are doing so. While it isn’t always the best idea to follow the crowd you can’t have failed to notice that many high-profile bloggers have recently been making posts about Twitter. To get an idea just how popular Twitter is within the blogosphere look at the results for this Google Blog Search.

So why is Twitter getting so much attention from bloggers? Well, one very obvious advantage is that it gives you another channel through which you can reach people and get your message out to them. In order for that to be effective, however, you’ll need to get a good number of people following you.

Fortunately Twitter isn’t just about you getting your message out to others There’s a great number of interesting tweets and conversations going on all the time from many well known bloggers and marketers - and some are making early announcements and exclusive offers to their Twitter followers . If you’re not using Twitter then you’re missing out on all that.

One thing that I had been doing up until recently was using the Twitter Tools WordPress plugin to create a daily digest of my tweets right here on my blog. I’ve now decided to switch that feature off since I felt that the tweet digests were cluttering up the blog and distracting readers from the real content here. I’m still going to be showing my latest tweets on the sidebar but if you want to ensure that you are completely up to date then you will need to follow me on Twitter.

Don’t get left behind any more. Start using Twitter right now.

So What Is Twitter All About?

No doubt you’ve heard quite a bit about Twitter already but just in case you haven’t it is a micro-blogging platform where you can post updates about what you are currently doing. Think of status updates in Facebook and you’ve pretty much got the idea.

Each update (or “tweet” in Twitter-speak) can be up to 140 characters long and can be posted either via the Twitter website, a SMS message from your cell phone, an instant messenger or one of the many third-party applications that have been developed.

As well as being able to post your tweets you can also follow other people to keep up to date with what they are doing and also get people to follow you. This is where it starts to get interesting because you are now building a network of other people using Twitter. Once you start doing this you can also post a second kind of tweet where you reply to something somebody else has said. It’s a great way to build up a rapport with people in your Twitter network.

Twitter for Bloggers

Another cool feature of Twitter is that it can easily be integrated with other websites. For example, in my post about WordPress plugins I listed Twitter Tools as one of my recommended plugins because it makes integrating your blog with Twitter so simple.

The first and perhaps most obvious thing it can do for you is to automatically post a tweet every time you post to your blog. This is handy once you’ve built up a following on Twitter since you are now automatically promoting your blog.

That’s not all it can do though. You also have the option of either automatically posting to your blog whenever you post a tweet or posting a daily digest post of all your tweets for the day. Personally I prefer the daily digest option since tweets are so short and may not warrant an entire post of their own. Also, if you find a handy web link simply post a tweet about it and it will end up on your blog without you having to write a full post about it.

So now you’ve covering both sides of the coin. Your Twitter followers can see that you have posted on your blog and your blog readers can catch up with what you’ve been posting on Twitter.

Twitter and Facebook

Another way that you can gain more exposure whenever you post a tweet is to add the Twitter application to your Facebook profile. This gives you the option of adding a profile box showing your latest tweet and it can also automatically update your status whenever you post a new tweet. When you start to combine this with the blogging approach I mentioned earlier you are starting to widen your sphere of influence - every tweet gets distributed to your blog and Facebook and every blog post is now promoted on Twitter which in turn gets posted to Facebook automatically.

Twitter and RSS

At the bottom of your Twitter page you’ll find a link where you can get a RSS feed of your latest tweets. This again is powerful stuff for integrating with other websites. As an example I’ve added my Twitter RSS feed to my Jaiku profile so now all my tweets - and blog posts thanks to Twitter Tools - get promoted in yet another place. Of course this it just a simple example of how you can use your Twitter RSS feed since you now have the ability to automatically publish your tweets at any site that can consume a RSS feed.

I hope that this blog has given you some ideas of how you can use Twitter as part of your overall internet marketing strategy. Why not follow me on Twitter and keep up to date with what I’m up to?

The first site I sent her was Authority Black Book. There’s a new 2008 version available for you to download that you might want to get hold of. The other site was Social Media Daily which gives you an excellent step by step checklist of using social media marketing to promote your website.

I also got a comment on my Clipmarks page where it looks like it sounds like somebody is finding it difficult to get themselves a WordPress blog up and running. I haven’t check it out in too much detail though but Mike Paetzold has recently set up a free WordPress blog hosting service at MyCCBlog. You get a free WordPress blog with a number of good plugins already installed plus a huge selection of themes to choose from. If you’re thinking about starting a blog it could be well worth checking out.

If you’re running a PPC campaign or trying to get a good organic search ranking for a particular keyword or phrase you may want to see what people will see in a country other than the one you are located in, especially if you are marketing to a target audience in a country other than your own.

Dave Davis from Redfly Marketing has created a very useful extension for Firefox than gives you a simple way to change the country that you see the results for. The screen shot below should give you an idea of it works.

The list of countries that appear on the menu are completely configurable so you can pick and choose exactly what you want to see there. You aren’t limited to just countries either. You can see the results based on cities, regions, zip codes and even a specific IP address. There is also an option to switch off your personalized search results which you might also find useful.

Download the Google Global Firefox Extension

There’s a great free service called Odiogo that takes your blog’s RSS feed and converts it into an audio stream. The end result is that you get a new audio RSS feed which means that you have just become a podcaster.

Now that you’re a podcaster you are now in a position to submit your Podcast feed to Podcast directories giving you more backlinks.