If I’m happy with the number of searches for this potential niche, I next want to see how much pay per clicks (PPC) are going to cost me on Google Adwords. For that I can use a tool like SpyFu (http://www.spyfu.com), which gives you some good intel for spying on your competitors.

 I want to make sure I won’t have to pay more than a dollar or two per click on average, but of course what you can profitably pay for PPC will depend on your product’s selling price and how many you can sell. Again, at this point I’m just trying to get a snapshot or pulse of this market.

 Plus, the bid process also tells you a little about the moneymaking opportunities of a market. As a loose rule, if the cost/click hits anywhere between 50 cents and $3.00, it’s a good indicator that people are making money in this market. I call this my “magic window.” Over $3.00 means that the competition is too fierce for my tastes, but depending on your market and eventual product selling price and demand, it may make sense for you.

 Another great tool I pointed out is Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends).

There’s lots of useful information here. You can see that the news volume is synced with the search volume, and several notable news articles are displayed, along with where they occurred on the timeline.

In the lower section, you can see which countries, cities, and languages made the most searches. Be aware that the indicators are normalized, meaning they are adjusted for that region’s population. For example, South Africa has about 44 million people, compared with the U.S.’s 295 million. So the U.S. may have performed more actual searches, but after the adjustment is made, South Africa comes on top for this search term, which is “fly fishing.”

In the upper-right corner of the page, you can switch regions (e.g. if you wanted to check the U.S. only), and you can change the time period.

For example, notice below how I changed the time period to a single month. See any cyclic trends there?

You may have noticed that searches for this topic tend to spike every Friday, going into the weekend, and then fall again during the week. This information may be useful if you are going to advertise with Google Adwords, and you’re launching a firesale or other limited time campaign, because you’ll want to schedule your campaign around one or more of those spikes.

Some markets have different patterns, so it’s useful to be aware of them prior to launch.

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