I just heard about a site that might be up there with the best tools for niche research that I’ve ever seen.
This is a tool that allows you to uncover popular niches by…
Searching the internet for popular discussion boards and forums related to a keyword you enter.
It’s called twing.com
Here’s why I think this site has crazy potential for use by us marketers:
1. There’s a difference between knowing that a term has 10 000 searches per month and knowing that a term has 10 000 active forum threads related to it. The difference is that those 10 000 searchers in Google could be anybody – but the 10 000 forum threads are filled with people who are ACTIVE on the internet – they are accustomed to seeking information – they are more web savvy (generally) – they are more likely to know how to buy stuff (generally) – they are the kind of people you want in your niche!
This tool lets you find niches with those kinds of people.
2. It lets you guage the popularity of the forums over time. Just because 10 forums exist on a topic doesn’t mean it is a popular niche. But 10 POPULAR forums who’s members and thread/post count is increasing over the course of the year – that’s a good sign. Twing gives you all that data and more.
3. It actually provides suggestions of popular areas of forums. It’s like nicheorama before your eyes. You can hit the community buzz section and see random chunks of popular forum topics before your eyes. THEN you can analyze those and find out more about the forums in those niches. It’s like this tool has been made with niche research in mind.
What can you do with this tool?
1. Obviously – find a new niche market to get started in.
2. Find forums relevant to a site you already have where you can become a member, make posts and leave links.
3. Niche research and free links? What more do you want! (though in fact there’s even more you could use this tool for if you’re creative 
)
So hit it up, see what you find and enjoy!
P.S. I came across two interesting niches just while I was researching for this post!
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Thank you for the tip. I usually use Omgili. It is a great tool for research and for brand monitoring. It has many sections such as reviews, search aid, buzz search etc…
http://www.omgili.com – for discussions search (trouble shooting, solutions, opinions etc.)
http://buzz.omgili.com – well the same suggests
http://searchaid.omgili.com – Great to find what people are searching for…
There are more but I give up
Andrew
Thanks for pointing out this niche research site. I decided to search for something that typically doesn’t get a lot of results and was quite surprised to see it returned 31, 819 results.
When I looked into it further I found out why it was so popular. Searching by Relevance did bring back highly relevant and good quality stuff, so as I wanted the most recent content I then searched by date and that’s when I found out why the results were so good, there was page after page of porn spam.
This may not be the case with every market, nonetheless it’s something to be aware of, it’s probably well worth using the filter function to eliminate some of this junk.
I think this is a really useful site as long as you try to filter out the junk, I’m going to spend some time in here to see how I can optimize the results it returns.
Thanks
Duncan
PS. Thanks NetMagic for the Omgili info, I’ll take A look.
Awesome tool. Really gets the brain working. Also a great way to locate lots of content.
This is such an amazing tool. It’s incredible how many forum threads I found on my particular keywords. Thanks so much for your blog post and tool!
Yes yes, a great tool indeed, Andrew. Thanks for the heads-up!
Hi Andrew,
I’ll no doubt add and check this resource out.
I’ve been using keyword country – not happy
Then I’ve just got micro niche finder and still testing it out.
Other resources like ebay pulse etc still deliver as they always have
William
Thank you Andrew I will have a look at it a little while later–have a Dr. Appt soon–BTW this sounds like a really good site/tool.
Thanks for another useful tip.
Ever since I got Plug and Play, there has been so much more info. coming down.
Andrew, does all that was taught in Plug and Play still apply to today’s internet practices? I know it’s working for me a little, and if I dedicated more time to it, it would do better, but from an experts (you) point of view, does it -all- still work and would you recommend it to others?
Thanks, Trevor
Andrew, I think that niche research and the identifying of a profitable target audience of consumers is the most difficult and time consuming part of the IM game. Anyone who has a great idea for a niche market is going to keep it to themselves until it is oversaturated. Keep up the good fight.
Jonathan