Yahoo has a great, free tool that can help smart marketers find new market niches. It's called the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool.

To use this tool, to go http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/.

All you'll find on the page is the title Keyword SelectorTool, a couple of short paragraphs of text, and a search box labeled Get Suggestions for.

Now, comes the neat part. Just type in a word or phrase, for example, “pet supplies,” and click on the arrow to the right of the box. After a few seconds (or minutes), you will see a list of keywords related to “pet supplies.” The number to the left of the term is the number of times people searched on that phrase in the past month. In the case of “pet supplies,” you will see that the phrase most often search on is “pet supply,” with 322,491 searches. Below this, you will most likely see something like the following:

Bird pet supply represents a potential market niche because it's fairly specialized and yet people are clearly searching for products in this area. But you could segment even more.

Change the phrase in the search box from “pet supplies” to ”bird pet supply,” and click the arrow. The search tool generates a second list with “bird pet supply” at the top with its 1376 searches. But second on the list is 81 searches for “bird discount pet supply.” Here is a niche within a niche – people looking for discount bird supplies. You might not attract a lot of visitors to a site dedicated to discount bird supplies, but you can bet those that arrive at your site will be ready, willing and able buyers.

For that matter, look down the list a bit further and you will see 27 searches for pet supply bird cages. Couple this with the searches for bird discount pet supply, and you end up with 108 potential customers. You say this doesn't seem like many? Maybe not but if you could sell $20 worth of supplies to these people a month, you'd be grossing $2160 a month. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Since the Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool is free, you can run searches to your heart's content – on anything from pet supplies to the Korean War (22,655 searches last month).

It's a great way to find market niches and the price is right!

Here's a great way to find better sound. It's a new technology called HD Radio that enables AM and FM radio stations to broadcast their programs digitally. This is a tremendous technological leap from today's familiar analog broadcasts. These digital broadcasts provide listeners with radically improved audio quality, more radio channels through multicasting, and new data services. To learn more about this amazing new technology, just go my Web site, http://www.hd-radio-home.com, to get all the buzz.

Douglas Hanna is a retired marketing executive and the author of numerous articles on HD radio, internet marketing and family finances.

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