Find Your Competition’s Real Strength with Micro Niche Finder

At first glance Micro Niche Finder is your classic internet marketing keyword software. However unlike some of the more expensive tools on the market, Micro Niche Finder has it’s own… well… niche. Let me explain.

I want to disclose first and foremost that I own Keyword Elite and also subscribe to Nichebot.com. They’re both great keyword tools in the classic sense, and I use them extensively. Micro Niche Finder is different though.

Micro Niche Finder has some of those classic keyword finding features, but with a different twist. Instead of just helping you find keywords relating to a specific word or phrase, it’s designed to actually give you niche ideas.

So for example, let’s say I’m having trouble finding a profitable niche, any niche. I’m just stuck! No problem… I fire up my copy of Micro Niche Finder and search for some common phrases like “how to cure” or “how to fix.”

When I searched for the phrase “how to fix,” I get 149 niche ideas. The niches included topics like “how to fix squeaky floors” and “how to fix your credit score.”

One thing to note is that if you perform the search again, you’ll probably get a different set of results. So if it doesn’t find something that perks your interest initially, just try it again.

Okay so I decided that “how to fix your credit score” looked promising, so I simply clicked on that result and chose “Narrow Dig” from the pop-up menu. This tells Micro Niche Finder to do a keyword search for that specific phrase. In my case, it brought me 35 keywords relating to the niche “how to fix your credit score.”

Now I have two options:

1. I can stop here and use the 35 keywords for the “how to fix your credit score” niche, and do normal keyword analysis on those keywords.
2. Alternatively I could select one of the 35 keywords and do a “Narrow Dig” on them to research an even more laser targeted micro niche. In this case one of the results is “free credit score online” which might be a great niche if you affiliated with a merchant that paid you for leads.

In this case for the sake of brevity, I’m going to choose the first option and consider the 35 results as keywords in my niche. So I’m going to want to perform an analysis on them.

I can export the keywords and use Keyword Elite or Nichebot.com to do the analysis, however Micro Niche Finder has it’s own set of analysis tools, so let’s use those.

The first thing I do is select all of the keywords and get their WordTracker search counts. The only downside to doing this in Micro Niche Finder is that you have to enter the WordTracker CAPUTCHA every 10 keywords. Not a big deal though. There’s only 35 keywords, so I enter the CAPUTCHA a few times and I’m done.

Next I filter out any results that get less than 100 searches. This brought the list down to 19 keywords. So now I want the exact matches for the 19 keywords, which is a Google search for the total number of pages that contain that exact keyword phrase in the title, content, or URL of the site.

After I get the exact matches, if I’m going to monetize my site with AdSense, I’ll have it search for the Google Ad Cost. This is the estimated cost per click that advertisers pay for that keyword, and will give you a great indication of the amount of money you can make from the keywords with AdSense.

Finally after getting all of that information, I tell Micro Niche Finder to evaluate each keyword phrase and give me it’s Strength of Competition (SOC) score. This is the feature that really makes it stand out from the other tools available! Instead of hard to understand Ratios or KEI formulas, it simply gives you a number (lower is better) and a green, yellow, or red icon.

Green means you have a really great shot at ranking well for the keyword on Google. Yellow means to be cautious because it’s going to be more difficult. Red means “move on… ain’t gonna happen” so you know to avoid those keywords altogether.

Once I get the SOC results, I typically filter out anything that isn’t green. Hey… why make it hard on myself!

In this example, Micro Niche Finder has left me with 9 keyword phrases remaining.

Scanning through the 9 keywords, I can easily see how to optimize a web site around the niche. In fact, I can envision a 9 page web site as I type this!

Something interesting is the keyword phrase “free credit score online.” This has 57,600 exact matches at Google, so conventional wisdom says it would be harder to complete for that keyword phrase. However the phrase also has a total of 17,850 searches according to WordTracker–that’s a large number of searches for a phrase with an exact match count that low.

Hey, you thought you were just reading a Micro Niche Finder review, and I just gave you a free niche to target!

The software also does quite a bit more, however the features I just described are the main ones I use. Hopefully you can see how useful a tool like this can be for any internet marketer.

Before I end the review, I do want to point out a few shortcomings in the software:

• If you’re running Windows Vista, then you have to launch the software in Administrator mode, or it won’t run.
• The support is limited to e-mail support only. Although I haven’t had any trouble with the software, the one time I did have a question, I had to e-mail the author. (Update: they’ve recently added Live Support Chat, although they’re not always online.)
• Options that I consider ‘destructive’ such as deleting all of the keywords on the screen, etc., often do not have a confirmation dialog. So if you’ve just finished searching for all of the keywords’ Strength of Competition scores and you click “delete all keywords” instead of “delete filtered keywords” then you have to start over. This isn’t a deal breaker by any means, but something you do need to be careful about when using the software.

Aside from those few caveats, I find Micro Niche Finder to be an irreplaceable part of my internet marketing tool chest, and something I highly recommend you check out for yourself.

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