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Using Micro Niche Finder

Micro Niche Finder for Niche Market Research: a Review

Micro Niche Finder is a program that integrates several keyword tools and databases on the internet. As the name implies, the purpose of Micro Niche Finder is to make it easy to find long tail keywords and corresponding market niches. How well does Micro Niche Finder fulfill its purpose?

Given a keyword to look up, Micro Niche Finder uses the Google keywords tool to create a spreadsheet of related keywords, their local and global search counts, histograms of their local searches over the past year, and Google AdWords cost. The local search counts are the numbers of searches during the last month at the Google search locale, e.g. the United States, and the global counts are an estimate of the average number of searches world wide for the phrases. Additional columns, not initially filled in, are for evaluating the level of competition:

(1) the number of web pages containing precisely that keyword phrase,

(2) the availability of domain names with that keyword,

(3) an estimate of the fraction of searches made with the intention to make a purchase,

(4) the strength of competition, and

(5) an average number of back links to pages on page one of the Google search results.

The spreadsheet can be sorted into increasing or decreasing order by the values in a column. Rows can be marked for deletion. Normally the first thing you would do with a spreadsheet is delete the rows with too few searches and whose keywords have an irrelevant meaning.

Normally the second operation is to find the number of pages containing the keyword as an exact phrase. This can be done in the background. Micro Niche Finder uses the Google search page for this information. The number of exact matches is one estimate of the amount of competition for the keyword, so you typically delete all rows (keywords) with too many competing pages.

The Strength of competition, also available through a Google search, is a count of the number of pages optimized for the keyword, i.e. containing the keyword in the title, in the page URL, and as anchor text in links pointing to the page. Pages optimized for the keyword all these ways indicate intentional competition for the keyword, and again, keywords with high values should be deleted. Micro Niche Finder marks the keywords green, yellow, or red to indicate easy, harder, and crushing levels of competition.

The commercial intent, accessed from Microsoft, indicates the fraction of searches with an intent to purchase. If you are interested in web sales, you should go for the higher values (or be willing to attract much more traffic). You may wish to delete keywords with too low a commercial intent.

The measure of back links is relatively new in Micro Niche Finder. High values would argue that established, widely referenced pages have a decided advantage, and you may not get to page one of the search results even if the competition is otherwise moderate.

Click on a keyword, and Micro Niche Finder offers you help in finding affiliate products and exploiting them. You can search for affiliate products at Clickbank, at Amazon, or through a Google search. You can search for aa available domain name with the keyword, important for creating a commercial web site. You can search for ezine articles or unlicensed content to provide quick content for your web site. Once you have found a viable keyword, Micro Niche Finder helps convert it into an income flow.

It should be clear that all this information is valuable if you are intending to attract traffic to your web site, and especially if you intend to do niche marketing.

Micro Niche Finder is not without problems. In the most recent version, 4.6.4, I have encountered four major annoyances: (1) the sort key is limited to a single column, (2) the ability to filter, i.e. automatically select, rows in the spreadsheet is restricted to examining the values in a single column, (3) filtering replaces the results of an earlier filter rather than refining them, (4) calculating the measure of back links cannot be performed in the background.

Moreover I have found these implementation problems:

(1) Sometimes the background download queues crease running and need to be restarted.

(2) Sometimes when Micro Niche Finder tries to display a new page, it cannot find the page.

(3) Printing the spreadsheet will not show the values returned by the most recent searches unless you exit Micro Niche Finder and restart it first.

Fortunately, upgrades become available frequently, so the problems may soon be fixed.

Micro Niche Finder is not irreplaceable. You can look up all this information yourself, but if you are doing frequent searches, you will save much more in time and tedium than the approximately $100 cost of the software. I have come to rely on Micro Niche Finder for my long tail keyword searches. I highly recommend it to anyone doing web marketing or search engine optimization.

Micro Niche Finder tutorial, videos, and other information

Here we have a quick video overview of Micro Niche Finder. Below that are links to a video tutorial on using Micro Niche Finder for niche market research.