Market Samurai

The Keyword Program of Market Samurai

There is a video posted on this blog entitled “How I Find a Niche Using Market Samurai”. The narrator demonstrates the procedure in real time, and in seven minutes, reaches a conclusion about his chosen keyword.

Since it is difficult to see exactly what is happening on the video screen, and because I happen to find it easier to learn something through reading, I decided to give a more detailed account of exactly what to do to find a profitable niche market using Market Samurai.

This page was intentionally not made into a blog post, so that it will always be easily available to you.

The graphics below show only part of the Market Samurai window, so that you can read the words more easily.

Market Samurai’s raison d’etre is to discover and exploit a profitable microniche market. In order for the keyword defining this market to be profitable, it must meet the following basic criteria:

1. Have sufficient traffic: It must be a phrase that is actually being used by people in search engines.
2. Not have too much competition: It’s usually not worthwhile to enter a market that is already fiercely competitive.

I am going to use Market Samurai’s “Keyword Research” module to find such a market.

Basic Procedure for Using the Keyword Program of Market Samurai

1. When we first open the software, we are presented with this window. I will “Create a New Project”.



2. We begin by entering a seed keyword. To avoid heavy competition, we want to use a seed which is relatively specific. I would like to start a project having to do with “plants”, but this is much too general a phrase. So I’m going to start with “indoor plants”. I enter that into the “Project Settings” form.



3. The next screen, shown above, presents a list of all the modules in Market Samurai. For now, I’m only interested in the first one, “Keyword Research”.



4. Click “Generate Keywords”.



5. Enter the captcha.



6. I get a list of 200 keywords related to my seed.



7. Next, I remove those that are too general, or inappropriate. If I click on the “X” next to the keyword I want to remove, it gets moved to the small window shown above. For example, I decide that “gardening” is too general, and that “pictures of indoor plants” is inappropriate for my purposes. I also decide that I don’t want any keywords containing the word “info”, so I highlight this word in one of the keywords, and click the “X”. This removes 5 entries, all of which contain “info”. The goal is to reduce the list to less than 50. I end up with 47 (not shown).
8. Now I “Analyze Keywords”. Market Samurai Googles my remaining keywords, to see if they have received any traffic, and deletes any that have not been used. This leaves me with 29 (not shown).



9. The top of the screen now shows 11 statistics that Market Samurai can find. It has already found the first three, which it used to narrow down my keyword list to 29. Next, I want to look into the “Competition” as well, so I check that box, as well as the “Organic” box, and “Analyze Keywords” again.



10. The next step is to remove the keywords with insufficient traffic, so I expand the “+” sign next to “SEO Traffic”, and enter a min of 80. I also want to remove keywords with too much competition, so I expand the “+” sign next to “SEO Competition”, and enter a max of 30,000.

    The number of keywords is automatically reduced further. In my case there’s only one keyword remaining.

11. Finally, check off all the remaining stats, and “Analyze Keywords” one last time.

VOILA! Looks like I might have found a profitable microniche, “indoor house plants”, although it actually seems kind of redundant. The next thing I want to do is use the second Market Samurai module, “SEO Competition”, to see just how stiff the competition actually is for this keyword. That will be the topic of the next page