Plus, the bid process also tells you a little about the moneymaking opportunities of a market. As a loose rule, if the max bid results are between 30 cents and $2.00, it’s a good indicator that people are making money in this market. I call this my “magic window.”

Over $2.00 means that the competition is too fierce for my tastes, but depending on your market and eventual product selling price and demand, it may make sense for you.

To check on the companies that are bidding on my keywords in Google Adwords, I use http://www.googspy.com.
One relative newcomer as a research tool is Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends).

There’s lots of useful information here. You can see that the news volume is synced with the search volume, and several notable news articles are displayed, along with where they occurred on the timeline.

In the lower section, you can see which countries, cities, and languages made the most searches. Be aware that the indicators are normalized, meaning they are adjusted for that region’s population. For example, South Africa has about 44 million people, compared with the U.S.’s 295 million. So the U.S. may have performed more actual searches, but after the adjustment is made, South Africa comes on top for this search term, which is “fly fishing.”

In the upper-right corner of the page, you can switch regions (e.g. if you wanted to check the U.S. only), and you can change the time period.

For example, notice below how I changed the time period to a single month. See any cyclic trends there?

You may have noticed that searches for this topic tend to spike every Friday, going into the weekend, and then fall again during the week.

This information may be useful if you are going to advertise with Google Adwords, and you’re launching a firesale or other limited time campaign, because you’ll want to schedule your campaign around one or more of those spikes.

Some markets have different patterns, so it’s useful to be aware of them prior to launch.

Another great use for Google Trends is if you are trying to decide between two different niches. If you enter your search terms and separate two or more with a comma, Google will compare them for you.

Very useful.

Discover why all the work is already done for you in the next installement of the serie…