The two services in question are answers.yahoo and answers.google.
Generally speaking, they are used by people, who need to ask others specific questions and get some answers. Yahoo's service is free, while Google employs qualified researchers, who charge a fee for the answers they provide.
But today we will not be asking any questions. We are going to do some treasure-hunting in the archives that both services provide.
It's a common knowledge that one of the best ways to find product ideas is to discover problems that other people have - and solve them with your product (i.e. your website).
Well, both Yahoo's and Google's archives will provide just the information we need. What's more, they will provide not only questions, but very often also answers to them.
As Yahoo's service is free, it has grown enormously - currently it has over 25 million questions in its database! They cover virtually any subject imaginable - from humorous to technical.
Google's archive is not as big, but because researchers are paid, some of the answers are of extremely high quality - if you've never used this service, you will be truly surprised how many hours of work they sometimes spend to answer a single question.
It means that by combining both services, we will discover both problems that people have and the same time, we will learn quite a bit about our niches.
Using answers.yahoo to discover new nichesOne good thing about Yahoo's service is its excellent tree of categories, which allows you to precisely narrow your potential niche. Here's the method that I usually use.
1. I select a broad category and I dig deeper until I find that there are no narrower choices. For the sake of this example, I've first selected Education & Reference and then Home Schooling. It's not because I had any particular inclination for that niche. It just caught my attention.
2. The key is to be able to quickly judge how hot any niche is. To do that, click on the "Discover Resolved Questions" tab after selection your niche. For me, this proved to be the most efficient way - I don't bother with unanswered questions.
3. In the next step, sort all questions by the number of answer provided, so that questions with the most answers will be on top. If you discover that top questions receive only a handful of answers (less than 10), it is usually an indicator that the niche may not be so hot.
4. In our case, question no. 1 is "What do you think about Homeschooling? And why?" and it has 1425 answers at the moment of writing it. Well, it seems that there are some people passionate about the subject!
5. Click on the question mentioned above to open it and the first set of answers.
6. No doubt that people have a lot to say about the subject. But what about monetization of this niche? At this point, we will use a method that I described in a previous articled Profitable niches in under 10 minutes. Just follow the steps 2-5, but with two important differences. Substitute en.wikipedia.org with the actual URL of the page with the question and answers from step 5 above. Then deselect the "Include other pages on my site linked from this URL" option - otherwise our results would include totally unrelated phrases.
7. Bingo! We have a very nice and deep niche with many high-paying phrases.
8. As usually, I would recommend that you head to Wordtracker and do further keyword research, using phrases provided by Google as your starting points. I run a quick test and within minutes found thousands of related phrases. Some of them have very little competition.
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9. But that's not all. If you need some inspiration and potential subjects for your articles, just go back to a list of questions. You will find all that you need over there:
Just some examples:
- Are home schooled kids smarter?
- Why do parents choose to home school their children?
- How is home schooling better than a public school?
- How do you home school your children, where do you start?
- High School or homeschool?
What's best, you will also get dozens of answers to these questions, so you can immediately gather some good arguments even if you're completely new to any particular niche.
Using answers.yahoo and answers.google to explore profitable nichesIf you have not read a previous article called A fool-proof way to discover the hottest markets, please read it now.
It explains how you can use Commission Junction to discover profitable niches. In the example that we discussed, it turned out that mattresses were a huge and profitable market. Fine, but if you're like me, writing about mattresses is not the most exciting prospect.
Unless you can discover that some people have very specific problems in that area. Let's see how Yahoo's and Google's services can help with that.
1. Go to answers.yahoo and in the search box, enter mattress. In my case, this query returned 883 results. Well, quite an inspiration for a niche website! In fact, I was able to quickly get ideas for over 20 articles - in under 5 minutes. Even better, I could also use the answers provided to greatly speed up the research process.
2. Quite often I use the advanced search offered by Yahoo's service. I choose to search my keywords in the questions only (this way I avoid many unrelated questions, in which my keyword appeared incidentally in any of the answers) and to search only among resolved questions, where the best answer has been chosen - it generally leads to more targeted content of higher quality.
3. Now go to answers.google. Remember, this is a service where askers have to pay to get answers. But in many cases, you can expect very solid research. In the search box, enter mattress and select the "answered questions" option from a drop-down menu.
4. I will now point out some of the answers that I've found, all related to our sample niche. They really give you a nice start and a lot of knowledge required to start writing your original articles.- A complete list of major brand names mattresses - pure gold in any SEO-related efforts.
- Best mattress cover for people with allergies
- Incredibly detailed information on mattresses replacement for wound care
There are many more, but my intention here was only to show you the quality of information on sometimes very obscure subjects. Given that your probably will venture into niches that you know little about, such sources are invaluable.
Stay tuned for the next articles in a series on discovering profitable niches!
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