Remembering to consider the market trends in a niche is one of the most important factors to take into account before you persue it and it will be a deciding factor in whether your website makes money or not.

When you decide to pursue any niche there are usually a few factors which should have played a part in helping you to make your decision. The following factors are most probably the ones which you were able to confirm:

• Your niche has enough search demand in the search engines
• Your niche is not too competitive in respect to competition
• Your niche has enough products within it to promote and are selling well

But did you ask yourself if your niche products are selling all year round?

There are certain niche products which will have an obvious search trend, seasonal items such as Christmas decorations or Easter costumes are prime examples of these. But there are other niche products which have slightly more complex search trends which you absolutely must take into account before moving any further with that niche. Read the rest of this entry »

I don't know if any of you have come across this tool yet but I found it a short while back and have been using it in conjunction with my BANS experiment, which is still ongoing, to determine product popularity during my site build.

What is Watch Count?

WhatchCount.com is basically a website which has been built from the eBay API primarily to show you the watch counts of the most popular items on eBay. Each eBay item which is currently for sale will have a watch count which, as the name suggests, is the number of people currently watching a particular item, this number can range from anywhere between 1 and a limitless number. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may well know there are many tools which Google provide that allow you to carry out a lot of tasks completely FREE from the comfort of your desk; one of these tools is called Google Insights. Now Google insights isn't a new tool by any means, in fact it's been around for quite some time but you would be amazed the amount of people who don't know about it or choose not to use it.

So what is Google Insights? Basically it's a tool which allows you to compare and analyse search volume and patterns for your specified search terms over a given period of time, area of the world or a specific category. Essentially what the information allows you to do is:

• See if a particular search term appears to be becoming more or less popular
• See the trend of increasing and decreasing popularity over a period of time for a specific search term
• See which geographical locations your particular search term is most used.
• See patterns as well as peaks and troughs at particular times of the year or within particular geographical locations.
• See search terms which are directly related to the term you have entered along with percentage stats indicating whether the search trend for that particular term is increasing or decreasing.

Read the rest of this entry »