If it's selling offline then it'll almost certainly sell online

Clearly that doesn't apply to window cleaning, although I sometimes think that Microsoft could do with a good Windows cleaner.

Anyway, here are a couple of quick and easy ways to spot a hot topic..

1. Check out Zinio and browse through the categories of magazines. Magazines are expensive to publish and the presence of a magazine in a niche market is a good indication that there is a demand for information and, just as importantly, people are already paying to advertise products and services to that market. When you discover a niche that interests you, be sure to look at the magazines to see what types of things are being advertised.
2. Go to your Amazon site of choice and skim through the top level categories to identify a general topic that interests you.  Then keep digging down into the sub categories. Be sure to sort your search results by "Best seller". If it's a best seller on Amazon, you can be sure that there's a market for the topic online. It's important to search your local Amazon if you're targeting a geographic region, there's no point in looking for the best selling products on the US site if your market is Spain.

There's some incredibly valuable data available to you on Amazon that lot's of people miss.....{+}

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Let me take a moment to explain how I calculate my break even point; and then we can move on to why understanding your niche's demographic can save you a lot of money and tap into targeted traffic at a much lower cost..

For example, let's say that we're promoting a £279 product with a 10% affiliate commision. That means each sale will generate £27.90 and, if the sales letter is converting at the typical 2%, our income per visitor will be: (£27.90 x 2)/100 = £0.558. So our PPC breakeven point is 56 pence and anything less than that will earn us a profit.

Now, when I see my competitors paying 56 pence per click and above, my decision is easy. I'm going to leave them to it and move on to my "Plan B" where I'll target the same audience but I'll attack the market from a completely different direction based on my in-depth knowledge of the demographics.

Plan B requires a little "out of the box" thinking. Let me explain.. ...{+}

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Here are a few methods that I use personally to keep up to date with what my competitors are doing..

Google Alerts - Set up an alert for your competitor's brand names, product names and websites. This is especially useful for spotting press releases, newly posted articles, forum activity, blog posts and other announcements.

Ezines - Subscribing to your competitor's ezines and newsletters offers an excellent way of keeping up with their marketing activities. They often announce new initiatives to their subscribers before going public.

Products - Purchasing a competitor's product can give you a much better view of their sales and marketing processes. You can see at first hand how effecient they are at delivering on their promises and you can analyse the quality of their products and customer service. You'll also get those customer only announcements and offers.

Affiliates - There's probably no better way of getting access to a competitor's marketing and promotional approach than to become their affiliate. You'll get to see all the creatives that they give their affiliates including banners, text adverts and ezine adverts.

Links - Search engine rankings are, to a large extent, driven by a combination of the number and quality of incoming links. Not only is it a good idea to see who is supporting your competitors, it's also helps to identify where you too could get links to your own sites.

Social Networks - Social marketing is rapidly growing in popularity. Consumers are driving conversations about what they purchase, from whom they make those purchases and what they think about the products and services that they buy. Not only should you be paying attention to what they are saying about you and your products, you can also monitor what is being said about your competitors.

Twitter - Probably the fastest growing network online right now and a great place to see who's talking about your niche market and what's being said. If you're not participating in Twitter, you should be.

BackType - A relatively new site that aggregates the comments from blogs you wish to follow. When you think about it, blog posts are only "one way" comminication. However, blog comments can take on a life of their own and all that interaction can become a mine of useful information. Especially when you monitor the comments on your competitor's blogs.

Bookmarks - You can bookmark your competitor's sites and you can see how popular those sites are on sites such as Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Stubleupon and many more similar social bookmarking sites. I'd suggest sticking with the most popular social bookmarking sites in your niche, it can become very time consuming.

Friendfeed - Another aggregator that allows you to stream feeds from several sources. Subscribing to your competitor's feeds with Friendfeed and paying attention to the content will save you a lot of time.

Obviously, this isn't an exhaustive list, please add your own tips and suggestions in the comments section below.

How do you monitor your competitors?

But then, that's what everyone is going to be doing, so how do you stand out from the crowd? How do you gain that all important competitive edge?

One of my little "secrets" is to subscribe to Google Alerts using some very specific search terms such as "Announcing", "New Model", "Latest Release", together with your primary keyword. This works really well with products such as mobile phones, computers and other equipment that is regularly updated.

As I mentioned earlier, lots of people will recommend reviewing the Amazon top seller lists to uncover niche topics and, while that can be very effective, there's a sneaky technique that I use to leverage Amazon's information to beat my competitors.

Here's what you should do.. ...{+}

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