I am sure you have heard it before, it is no secret that market research is the key to finding a profitable niche. In my free niche marketing course I go into great detail on how to narrow down a niche to find those golden nugget long tail keywords that will give you an adaquate amount of traffic to make a decent living from any niche. I believe that market research and keyword research in particular is the single most important step in any internet business. It is the make or break factor. Do it right and you will get tons of traffic. Do it wrong and you are totally wasting your time.

When choosing your keywords you need to look at the amount of competition and the number of daily searches. The amount of marketable products available and the commercial intent of the traffic you will generate. Personally, I use a tool called Market Samurai to do all of my market research. They offer a free trial so you may want to check it out.

The key to a profitable niche is to find a keyword phrase that generates a minimum of 100 daily searches with less than 30,000 websites competing for that particular keyword phrase. This can be an extremely time consuming task to do manually but it is not impossible. You just keep digging deeper into a niche until you find a keyword phrase that has little competition. The trouble with that is you may find that the keyword has little competition because there are few buyers.

I will give you an example because it is a big mistake I personally made in the beginning. I had decided I wanted to explore the niche market of knitters. I knew it had become a popular craft again and I figured it would be profitable. I found my golden nugget long tail keyword for knitting patterns, built a blog and spent several hours every day building traffic to the blog. It did not take long though. Within 3 months I was getting 500-600 daily visitors.

The trouble was that no one was buying. I had made the mistake of choosing an information keyword and not one with any great amount of commercial intent. People visiting my site were not there to buy. They were there to find information only. I made a few hundred dollars each month from pay per click ads but I would have done better to use the more transaction based or commercial "square knitting needles" or "hand dyed yarn" as my long tail keyword because chances are anyone typing in that phrase in a search engine would have been looking to buy products

So you see, when choosing a keyword for your profitable niche you must consider more than just traffic and competition. The commercial intent of anyone typing the phrase into the search engine will determine whether you make sales or not. Unless you are strictly planning on making a few dollars of profit from Adsense or other pay per click advertising, providing an informational website will not pay unless you choose a transaction based keyword.