So, you want to know exactly how many searches a term gets every month, week or day? Well, a simple technique I use shows you exactly that. I’m not suggesting this technique is in any way new, or innovative. It’s a simple technique that many newbies may not have heard of, so I figured it is worth sharing.

Whenever I am researching a niche to try and identify whether it will be profitable or not, the first thing I do is punch the keyword (and as many variations as I can think of) into the Google Keyword Tool. If this shows a nice high number of exact matches per month, I then use this trick to identify how many searches there are in reality. All I do is setup an adwords campaign for the exact match keyword, and setup an ad that I know wont get clicked due to irrelevancy. It’s a good idea to have a seperate account to do this, as Google won’t be keen on you if you do this regularly, so you don’t want this method tainting your regular campaigns. To make the ad irrelevant, I tend to just put something about me (it’s ALL about me haha)! For example, I was recently researching a fishing niche (not my usual tipple, but if its profitable, I’m there!) and put up the following ad…

Not all that interesting is it? Well, that’s the point! I had the ad on page one 100% of the time for the chosen keyword for a week, and received 0 clicks. So for a grand total of £0.00 I managed to find out exactly how many searches the term receives over a week. Obviously you’d have to take seasonal issues into account, and whether the product is more popular at certain times of the month, but this gives you a great idea of how popular the term is, with real data that you’ve gathered yourself. Needless to say, the term received a hell of a lot less searches than the Google Keyword Tool suggested, but I’m still going to rock with the niche, cause theres zero competition!

OK, first of the Affiliate Quick Tips™ is the use of the allintitle syntax on google search.

Google has lots of little tricks you can use to get more from their search results, in the post I’ll explain the use of allintitle.

When you come up with any idea, one of the first things you should do (even before domain research) is analyse the competition in the market. If the competition is strong, it may not be worth your time focussing on that niche. If the competition is weak, excellent, you’ve found a niche worth targeting and you can move onto your domain research.

One way to calculate how many sites are going to be up against you in the SERPs is to use the allintitle search function. This function will show you exactly how many websites in the good index have the words you’ve searched for in their title tags. The title tag on a page is a key factor in the on-site SEO, so its important to include your targeted keyword in the tag. Here are a few examples of different allintitle searches and as you can see the competition varies somewhat:

allintitle:car insurance – 11.8m webpages have the words car and insurance in their title tag

allintitle:gavin and stacey dvd – 7,040 webpages have the words gavin, and, stacey and dvd in their title tag

allintitle:233LGS – 567 webpages have the word 233LGS in their title tag

So, as you can see the competition is ridiculous for car insurance, its pretty strong for gavin and stacey dvd and its pretty weak for 233LGS. But, what is 233LGS I hear you ask? Its the model number for a £95 watch available at Goldsmiths and various other merchants and the domain name 233LGS.co.uk is available. With commission starting at 10% at Goldsmiths I think it’d be worth a shot!

So, the next time you’re researching your niche market, give allintitle a whirl and let me know how you get on!