The final free tool we are going to discuss on this series on niche marketing is Quantcast.com. The more you know about your niche’s demographics the better and this is where we are going to find the best information quickly and easily.
Go to www.Quantcast.com and once there register for free.
Then pick one of the top web sites you have found in your niche. Quantcast will provide you with information on their site and their demographics. You may want to check out three or four or more sites to see how the results are the same of different. If they are different you will want to reason out why.
By examining the demographics of people going to the top competitors in you niche you should be able to pick up some solid insights into the audience you will want to target with your site or product.
Quantcast is a tool that you can use to find the demographics of your audience. This tool allows you to gather traffic statistics and demographics data for any existing sites on the Internet.
For this demonstration, we will continue to discuss the Sleep Apnea niche we have covered in past posts. One of the top sites in the forums was www.apneasupport.org
When we search on it we discover one of the limitations of Quantcast. Small and moderate sized sites are not as well documented as are major authority sites. That said in this case they do return data which we will review. We just need to keep in mind that it may not be as accurate as we would prefer, but it’s much better than nothing.
Like Google Trends it provides a graph showing their estimate of the traffic to the site.
The Quantcast statistics suggest average traffic of about 14.8K per month.
The above 6 month chart shows a drop off in traffic in the months of November and December of 2009. In this case the data is from just the US.
On larger sites, you can get world wide distribution as well.
Below the traffic chart is the nitty gritty and why we want to use Quantcast, the Demographics.
With this data we see that the searchers for information on the topic are somewhat more likely to be women, typically 35 or older with the largest group 50+. Most are Caucasian with no children at home. They tend to have had a college education with more than an average amount having graduate education, but their incomes tend to be slightly below than average which may indicate a significant portion of retired people.
With this background information, you now have a better idea of who your prospect may be. To do this right you should as I mentioned check on several other related sights to see what variations in the data you can find.
This will allow you to brainstorm ideas to make your site more user friendly, which in turn should help the success of your venture. It may also give you ideas on the type of additional products you could offer your prospect.
This finishes my tour of free research tools you can use to identify and develop profitable niche markets. In my next post in this series we will discuss competition.