6 Tools for Helping You to Choose a Niche for Your Blog

May 10, 2009 by Shivendu Madhava

Many tools have been developed that are helpful for bloggers in the process of selecting a niche topic for their blog. The following tools are ones that we use in this research phase:
•AdWords Keyword Tool—Sign up as an advertiser with Google AdWords and you get access to a number of useful tools that you can use without actually needing to use AdWords to advertise. One par ticularly useful tool is the “Keyword Tool” (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool), which you need to be logged in to use. This allows you to type in a keyword (or phrase) and will give you an indication of how many people searched for that word in the past month as well as tell you how many advertisers are competing for that word in AdWords. This gives you an indication both of the popularity of the niche as well as whether there is potential income in it.
This tool will also give you other keywords that relate to the ones you enter, which is also useful to know.
•Google Trends—Google has a Trends tool at www.google.com/trends that is useful for looking at search volume on Google for different search terms. Though it won’t give you specific search numbers and doesn’t produce results for every term (it tracks just the most popular ones), it is useful for working out whether a niche is growing or shrinking and it allows you to compare two different terms to show you how big one is in comparison to another.
•Technorati—A blog search engine that gives you the ability to see what others are writing about on your chosen niche topic. It also has “popular” tools that show what’s hot around the blogosphere at any given point of time.
•Google Blog Search—Google’s Blog Search will help you to get a picture of who else is blogging on a given topic.
•Wordtracker—Wordtracker is a popular keyword research tool with a free trial that helps you to ascertain how many people are searching for different words and how many other sites are competing in those niches.
•Yahoo! Buzz—Yahoo! Buzz (http://buzz.yahoo.com/) is a summary of
information on what people are searching for at the Yahoo! search engine.