Ok, I admit, there are 1001 articles written already about how to find a niche market. Admittedly, I have written about 4 of those 1001 articles. But we learn and grow and hopefully grow and learn from others.

Recently, i came into possession of some excellent material from Peter Drew of EVOII and Bruteforce linking fame. From the wonderful shores of Australia comes this absolutely fabulous tip – use Alexa to decode the traffic streams of some of the biggest sites used by marketers.

Alexa’s keyword section can show you with a fair degree of accuracy, the keywords that are driving traffic to some of these massive sites.

Peter’s example started with the well known ezinearticles which as of this writing has a Google Page Rank of between 6 and 7.

Ezinearticles.com has tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of articles, all written by guys and gals who are trying to make some money. Yes, its true, there are hardly any altruistically written articles in there. Everyone of those articles has a resource box where the author is hoping you will click on his/her link and visit their site.

Yes, I am hamming a bit and possibly wasting your time but there is a quite serious reason for pointing out that no article in ezinearticle.com was written for just the sheer joy of publication. The lesson here is that each of the hundreds of thousands of articles was written by a writer with commercial intent even if some of the authors take particular joy in seeing their written word on someone else’s site.

So, what does this have to do with Alexa? Alexa says that ezinearticles.com is the number 131st top site in the world for online traffic.

That is massive, but look below at the traffic growth, its more than 35% higher in the past few months.

Ezine articles growth 35% - Niche Market Selection

So, again, I hear you asking whats the relevance to Niche Market Selection.

Why don’t we peek at the image to the left to see what particular commercially oriented Internet hungry marketers are driving this incredible growth.

Oh my gosh, a disproportionate amount of this massive commercial traffic is being driven by terms such as acai berry, reverse phone look up, mlm lead system pro.

What makes this so nearly unbelievable is the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of articles in ezinearticles and only about 3-4 products/niches are driving the majority of this rising traffic.

Look below :

Can you believe the 131st most popular site globally driven by just 3 products.

I am going to be redundant and once more say, “This is almost unbelievable“.

So, what’s your next step ? Should you jump into acai berry, reverse phone lookup or mlm system pro?

Well, the world is certainly beating a door to these products, but there is a bit more work to be done before jumping in headfirst.

At a minimum you will need:

• to verify how competitive the competition is.
• to find a relevant affiliate product or make one yourself
• to verify that once you have found a relevant product, that the sales funnel and related product pages for that product can really convert visitors.
• Then you will have to build a website or two or three and put a sales funnel in place that includes an autoresponder OR alternatively you could just attempt to drive related traffic directly to your affiliate link for the product you have chosen.

Did you ask what I would do?

It takes me only 15 minutes to research a domain, buy it, DNS it, install wordpress or Joomla and getting it going ( hint: modify your hosts file so that you dont have to wait for Domain Name Servers to finally know where your new site is ) – so because building the web property takes me so little time, I like to spend my time in researching a little more first.

So, I would keep looking.

These three products may be fairly well entrenched already. I wouldn’t discount them entirely yet because some of them may have very long legs ( read 2-4 additional years of sales before tapering off ) and a time period like that is easily long enough to get some natural organic traffic clicking on one’s affiliate links.

I would keep looking and do the same type of analysis with some of the other massive 2nd tier social networks. Don’t waste time analyzing myspace or facebook – I have done that already, these networks dont produce any major commercial pointers or keyword phrases at this time.

Where else can one go with this?

There are several other sites like Quantcast and compete that collect data traffic. Try substituting some of those for alexa and use them to analyze the top 10 tier 2 networks.

Happy hunting, feel free to comment, positively or negatively right here.