How identifying new niche can create a real online business

One of the key strategies in my online business is to identify new niches that have just emerged. With a new niche, the leverage you can have from SEO traffic is much stronger because the cost of achieving the rankings and traffic is much lower. This is why I wanted to do a post for the 10 new niches or industries that I have identified because I think you can really benefit from them if you take action.

Before that list, let me take this post to give you a concrete example of how a startup has cleverly mined an emerging set of keywords to build up a really strong traffic funnels. The startup is called Zapier . You probably have never heard of it so allow me to explain what it does.

Basically, Zapier lays on a friendly user interface to let users integrate services between companies. For example, if you want to synch your gmail contacts with Mailchimp, Zapier allows yous to do that without any coding experience. It is a pretty useful service and its primary target audience is small businesses who want to make their operation more efficiently through the syching of these different services.

Given its product, Zapier has chosen a very new but emerging set of keywords to target. These keywords center around "how to" questions that people asked to when they want to connect one service to another. Examples include:

"mail to evernote"
"evernote gmail integration"
"aim on gmail" (aim is the messenger application from AOL)
"wufoo and aweber integration"
"dropbox gmail integration"
"yahoo messenger wordpress"
"does batchbook accept paypal"

This strategy is very clever because all these services are new and therefore any how to questions related to them are probably very underserved in the SERPs. By focusing on these emerging set of keywords, the startup probably don't need much backlinks to rank for the different how to permutations that peole will asked around the different services that they want to connect with.

In fact, this can be a very fertile ground for a new technical site to address the above questions and target the same keywords. Once this site has rankings and traffic, wait for Zapier to offer an affiliate programme and start earning money. This is why I loved the online business models. They are just so many niches and possibilities that one cannot help but to earn money if one is more observant on what is happening. 

What this example has shown is that there will be new keywords emerging. You need to keep an eye out for them if you want to avoid the backlinks war. As a SEO practioner, you have the choice of what kind of SEO tactics you want to engage in. Only want to compete in hyper competitive keywords? Then go ahead with the linking game.

For me, I prefer to stake my claims in the niche research part of the game. Less manipultive efforts that wouldn't get into trouble with Google. Remember, SEO has 4 parts:

• Keyword research
• Content production
• Backlinks
• Feedback and monitoring

Each individual area above has mulitple levels of depth.  If you can master a couple of SEO skills that are not related to links, you can still attract search engine traffic. In a future post, I will take more what are the different sub levels of SEO that you can do and how each of them can get you traffic.