I bought Market Samurai. I bought Micro Niche Finder. I was really interested in which one of these programs would work for me as I continue to flog niche markets with crap. They both have their cults. Thousands line up on each side of the argument.
I had tried Market Samurai as a demo a year or so ago. I didn’t much care for it. Having to open up tab after tab to evaluate different keywords annoyed the hell out of me. But some tools had been added and maybe things were different. Micro Niche Finder is a product I didn’t know much about. I just saw that in every forum I visited to try to figure out if Market Samurai was worth buying comparisons were made with Micro Niche Finder. So how the hell are you going to know if one or the other was a worthwhile purchase unless you tried both? So I shelled out the cash to do so.
Like I said I had Market Samurai installed before so when I tried to make the purchase of the product it wanted to charge me $150. I decided I wasn’t for that option because I knew if you purchased soon after downloading the trial version you could have it for $97. I simply got a key sent to another email address and paid the lesser fee. Damn if I hate all these pay option gymnastics Internet marketers are intent on having you participate in. I also bought MNF for $97. I bought them the same day about a week ago. Market Samurai is also still technically in Beta though it seems like it has been for over a year. Whatever.
Micro Niche Finder
Instead of showing you how to evaluate a niche to build a website, I thought I’d show you how I used MNF to figure out why my website is a load of shit and doesn’t produce. The niche was/is “belly fat”. I’m sorry for not using the “dog training” niche to demonstrate some IM shit. I know that is what you are used to seeing and may find this niche confusing for the demonstration.
So I entered belly fat into the search bar and hit enter. I got 180 words in about 3 seconds. The next thing I do is click on the “Filter Results” tab. See that “Easy” button? I always click it to do the initial filter. It is a built in filter that automatically selects those keywords that match the user guidelines. That gives me an easy place to start.
Next I click global search count and remove some keywords that are obviously useless as too competitive. “Belly”, “lose fat”, etc. 56 out of the 180 “belly fat” keywords were selected for further study.
Next I click on the “Get Checked Exact” tab. What I am looking for is those results under 100,000. Less is better. This shows the number of web pages that are indexed in Google for the given exact phrase.
Once this is complete I sort the “Get Checked Exact” and only check those that are less than 100,000. You may choose less or more. As you follow along with my “belly fat” example you will note that of the 180 keywords I am down to 2 keywords that meet the criteria. Is it any damn wonder why I make zero money with this niche?
Anyway, at this point you are ready to figure out the “strength of competition”. If you have a bunch you would simply filter on those that have met the criteria up to now and have the program select those keywords to run the SOC check. The filter system in MNF is fantastic. As it is, for “losing abdominal fat” and “lose abdominal fat” are the only two to meet the criteria so I can simply click on “Get SOC” and it will quickly get the results. You are looking for green. Some look for green or yellow. Red is obviously bad and should be avoided.
So of the 2 keywords that were candidates for SOC check only one was worthy of the next step which is the “measure of backlinks”. I click the “Get MOD” and hope to see a result under 30 or so. I do. The keyword I should have been targeting was “losing abdominal fat.” I can assure you I have not got a single article that references “losing abdominal fat”. My freaking site was named after belly fat. I was being generous by even letting “losing abdominal fat” be analyzed.
Other goodies in the program can be seen by left clicking on the keyword. You will see a menu that will allow you to dig deeper in the keyword, find Amazon products with the keyword, Crapbank products, Ezine articles, etc. All very useful for various reasons.
Market Samurai
So did I hate Market Samurai? Not at all. It’s actually quite useful as well. As a matter of fact I am keeping both.
Curious about how Market Samurai did with my belly fat example? Me too. So here we go. Create a project then add a keyword to analyze. Click “Generate Keyword” and you will get a list of keywords. Then I click “Analyze Keywords”. It will bring back the SEO Traffic and something called PBR%. Now, the user manual says to filter SEOT with 80 and PBR% by 15%. I do and click filter. It leaves me with 60 keywords to mess about with.
Next we want to filter on the SEO competition, which is how many webpages appear for that exact term. We used 100,000 in MNF so we will here as well. I also leave the Adwords amount checked as well as SEO Value to see what Market Samurai says is the total value of that keyword. I click “Analyze Keywords” again.
So what are we left with? “Loose belly”, which make zero sense. “Getting rid of fat”. Could be interesting but it doesn’t contain my keyword phrase of “belly fat”. “Belly jiggle” which is funny and has no monetary value. And lookie here: “lose abdominal fat”. Interestingly close to what MNF found.
Now here is where these products differ. If you want to analyze “lose abdominal fat” you have to open up a new tab. remember in MNF where you click the phrases you want to evaluate for MOB and SOC? Well to get at the same data it requires a new tab in Market Samurai. Which isn’t a big deal for one keyword, but imagine if you had 30 to evaluate? In MNF I simply click the checkboxes and let it go to work. In Market Samurai I have to open up a new tab for each freaking keyword.
But the SEO info that Market Samurai brings you is actually incredibly useful. It evaluates the page that is ranked in the search engine for title, Yahoo directory inclusion, DMOZ, etc. If there are a couple of keywords with “Y” across DMZ, YAH, Title, etc. then maybe I pass on trying to compete with that word, particularly if the PR is 4 or better. This is all great info.
So, after I have weeded out the keywords with MNF I take those “green” keywords from MNF and drop them in Market Samurai’s SEO competition tab to do another important check. I want to know how competitive those pages are. How good their on page SEO is. This is useful info.
And that’s not all. Market Samurai will dig up content from Ezine Articles and other groovy sources. Is that important? Sure. Because you can evaluate the article to see how often it has been used on the web. If it’s only got a couple of indexes then I’ll use for one of my feeder sites. Duplicate content my ass. As long as it has been barely used I’ll use it. It can also publish content to your blogs. Nice.
Market Samurai also has a nice backlink finder tool. It will search through Squidoo, Hubpages, forums, Google blogs to find places to add you backlink. It will also figure out if it do-follow or not. Groovy stuff.
So there you are. I use and really like both of these tools. I find my keywords with MNF finder because it is more convenient and easier. I use Market Samurai to further my evaluation. I use Market Samurai to find content and publish to my sites. If I only bought one I would buy Micro Niche Finder.
{ 37 comments… read them below or add one }
Micro Niche Finder is the one that Garry Conn keeps pushing and pushing and pushing. That alone is enough to insure I will never buy it.
Good to know. Dunno who that dude is but as distasteful a marketer he may be and despite his ulterior motives you might want to keep an open mind if a tool like this could be of use. Go straight to the site and not give him a commish. Try it out. If it sucks (to you) then get you money back. He never has to know you bought it.
Splork,
do you really look at the number of competing pages in google??? why does that make any sense??? most of those pages listed have barely anything to do with the keyword being searched, or am i wrong?
I’m just saying, I have sites that compete with millions of other pages and I got them ranked on the first page for their KW in a month (not bragging, just trying to point out that # of pages indexed is irrelevant).
You know what, i’ll get some numbers for you, i’ll brb…………….
whokay, so I got ranked #1 in about a month with a new website for a term that gets searched 1,000 times a month (i know, not a lot, but also not my point) – the # of competing pages is 1,900,000.
I actually done this quite a few times, especially easy if the kw is the domain.
All i looked at was the first page of google – all PR2 or less, and most of them are PR0 or n/a.
Now, there are PR5 & PR6′s on the first page (which i am beating) – its funny, those sites are the products im actually promoting.
Long story short – # of competing pages has no revelance in your ability to rank well for a KW.
My $0.02
Your quibble is duly noted and yea competing pages are not a big deal either way. Just a small part of finding a keyword that I choose to compete with against all the other pages, whether that is 30,000 or 30 million. Sure, domain name, title, age, etc. are more relevant in competing for your term. I check for those too.
At the end of the day the only relevant thing is backlinks. All this other is noise in the hopes of finding keywords that pay which takes little effort for getting ranked. But if you are getting easily ranked against PR5′s and 6′s with brand new sites just by virtue of a domain name then you are certainly doing something right. God speed man.
@ Eric RL
I think MNF “Get Checked Exact” is checking to see how many pages have the “exact keyword phrase” in the title of the webpage. It is common to check the strength of your competition by using “allintitle” when searching.
If this is what MNF is doing it makes a lot of sense as competing pages with the exact phrase in their “page title” are much harder to beat.
Just my 2 cents
prior to the new keyword tool at TKA, someone mentioned in the forums about WebComp Analyst. Its literally made for TKA, you might want to take a look at it. Best and only tool I use, but niche refinary does one heck of a job
Market Samurai works through proxies and never blocks. This is a common problem with MNF.
I agree with Eric RL when it comes to keywords which produce only a few searches a day. I’ve done the same myself.
But I do think you need to look at your competition and how aggressively they are going after those keywords.
Oh and by the way, I get quite a few searches for “Belly jiggle” – it’s on a celeb blog which features Shakira…
Zania, yea, belly jiggle would be a good term as the tool suggests and you corroborate. Unfortunately monetizing the term itself appears rather dubious.
G.O.A.T. – good to know, though I won’t be researching any more keyword tools. I’m very happy with these two plus Traffic Travis.
JJ – You got it.
@JJ – yeah i used to do the quotes and allintitle thing a while back. I rarely ever do that now while hammering out some kw research.
All i look at is PR, backlinks, age, title for the first page of google results (very similar to TKA).
The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter how manny pages have the keyword in the title, it only matters what the 1st page of the google results (PR, backlinks, age, title , etc).
preeeeeetty simple.
@ Eric RL
Pardon me. I assumed you understood we were only talking about the first page of the serp’s regarding MNF and “allintitle”.
But, if you wish to speak in absolutes the only thing that reeeeeally matters is backlinks.
Don’t cha think?
I haven’t tried MNB but use Market Samurai which will do me for now. What I’d like to know though is does Google count all the searches in, their monthly search totals, that these programs carry out when using their rank tracking tools? I’ve noticed some keywords I’ve ranked for on page 1 that get say 3000 searches a month actually see little or no traffic so I’m wondering if those 3000 searches are people like me checking them regularly to see how their site is doing.
Google’s search data is flawed. But it is about as good as we have for making a decision on what keywords to choose when creating webpages. We’ve all had the same issues. It’s why we continue to sling more and more websites because you never know what is going to stick no matter how diligent you are in keyword research. You just try to stack the odds in your favor if you are going to play this shitty game.
Three things matter:
keywords
content
backlinks
I try to maximize each as much as possible to get the most out of my effort.
Low competition keywords. Debate among your selves how you discover them. But I have no interest in going up against millions of other pages on the term. And obviously I’m not going to use keywords on money sites that don’t pay so that requires some research as well.
I try to write content that is at least at a 10th grade level for money sites. No spam. No shit. Mostly original. I don’t want Daddy G to not approve. And I don’t want visitors to wonder what kind of moron built the page.
Backlinks is arguably the most important. I can overcome any keyword or content with great backlinks. Trouble is unless you are wearing the blackhat you aren’t going to get good backlinks without good content.
No sense in writing great content if your keyword is too competitive or doesn’t pay. No sense in getting trying to get backlinks if your content sucks. No sense in finding good keywords if you aren’t going to write good content pages for it.
It all matters. How you get there is up to you. It’s still a work in progress for me. The tool that works today, may not work tomorrow. I simply maximize what I have, move forward and keep my eye open on tools and ideas that might make things easier, more organized and less time consuming in my pursuit of making money in this racket.
I Use all the tools mentioned in this thread. I don’t care for MS, too clunky and slow.
For backlink research Webcomp Analyst is supreme, buggy at times though.
MNF is a nice tool, it is great for filtering results. the SOC is very misleading because it doesn’t take into account Domain Authority and non anchored links.
On many occasions I have an SOC of < 10 but the top sites in the Serps might be PR 6-7 255k Domain Links and 5k Page Links.
In my book thats an SOC of at least 800, I complained to them about it and they said it is because of "exact match" . Horseshit! Any SEO lives in the "exact match" world so I don't want to hear that shit.
The reality is the SOC is deeply flawed so I don't use it.
When I do KW research I need speed. That means proxies coupled with tools without bells and whistles. Its that simple.
MS is loaded with shit that's meaningless, MNF would be useless if it wasn't for the filtering and WebComp doesn't have proxy support.
I like MNF for the filtering. I also like it for the quick trend discovery and brainstorming. As far as SOC, eh, that’s why I kept MS. I use it for the SEO Comp data, which is really good. I also love pulling the articles from the directories to use on satellite sites. It’s awesome to find some content that hasn’t been used but a couple of times that works well for the niche you are building for. MS is definitely clunky but I’ve gotten used to it.
Bottom line is none of the tools are perfect. These just happen to be a great place to start your research and build out the site.
Hi Splork
I’ve just started a trial on Market Samurai and am pretty impressed. I agree with you that it seems to provide really useful data on competition analysis. I’ve been running keywords that come up as “green” in the TKA methods and their Niche Refinery through MS and it helps provide a really useful second filter for the tough words that slip through because of low page ranks but that you’d never beat in a gazillion years because they are ultracompetitive.
My question, though, was whether you’d also tried MS on pingbacks. I know that this is an area that has been spammed to hell and back but they make a big thing of it in the MS dojo but I’ve not found anyone who can tell me whether it really works.
Anyhow, your wisdom (or 2cents) is appreciated.
I haven’t bothered with the pingbacks so I really can’t say for certain if it works or not. In theory it sounds fine. I’d suggest you just run some tests and see if it works for you. Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.
Splork Great Review, Discusson Thread and information. I found you by accident, ok by Daddy Google as I was looking for a MNF vs MS Honest Non B.S. evaluation.
You and several commentors on this post highlight some absolutely great pros and cons.
And maybe the best of all was reinforcing some of the themes related to what’s really important when creating a site in a Niche.
Anyway, thank you all.
Oh, and I will probably go with MNF yet better understanding it’s SOC weakness.
It’s always good to read a candid review on these two products.
Micro Niche Finder is definitely easier to use out of the box.
The one thing that I didn’t notice on Market Samurai was whether it was possible to acquire both local and global searches.
I prefer local but some of my customers insist on being able to import both into my micro niche tracker program.
Jeff: Market Samurai has a language/region selector much the same as Google’s keyword tool (which of course is where the data comes from anyway…).
I bought both products but never really got into MNF. It’s probably just because I bought MS about a year before though, so that’s the one I’m used to.
After reading this review I’m thinking I should maybe dust off MNF; it sounds like it might get through the initial keyword ‘pruning’ faster than MS.
I think you should Craig. If nothing else, it is much faster than MS in my opinion.
I had a play with the demo version of MS but preferred MNF. For simplicity and speed it rules. Thought about getting both but I already spend too much time researching so don’t need any more excuses to dither about.
Get a green one, get exact domain, do intitle and inurl and then get it done is my motto.
I tell a lie. I do a bit of extra research using the free version of Traffic Travis which lists the top 20 sites and how well they’re optimized with the main on page seo tags.
PR be damned, I’ve just noticed I’ve got a PR2 site in the stupid relationship niche that I’ve done bugger all to other than publish about 20 unique articles and it earns a grand total of nuthin’ and doesn’t even rank for it’s target keyword term. The only traffic it get’s is loser back link spammers posting such insightful comments such as “nice blog. thanks.” Backlinks is where it’s at but how the hell did it get PR2.
That’s why I use MNF. I still use MS for the SEO data.
Dunno about your PR2. If it’s BS then it will go away. I’ve had sites/pages like that too that had a mystery PR but it ended up with a zero.
I think for the person that hadnt LEARNED with the MS, the choice between the two would be the Micro Niche Finder. For ease of use when it comes to just finding the niches, although I prefer the Market Sam for the other utilities it comes with, like help with finding links from competition sites in that niche…..
Nice review and discussion. I also found this when searching for a comparison between MS and MNF.
I’ve been using MS but stumbled across a reference for MNF which claimed its Strength of Competition feature was far quicker to use to find a niche than the more detailed competition module in MS (which requires interpretation each time). However, the comment by bk that SoC in MNF is deeply flawed obviously undermines that feature, so I may well just stick with MS…
It’s also a shame that there is no free trial with MNF – otherwise I could play with the SoC and check it for myself.
Thanks for reading Gez.
I don’t have a problem with SOC. I’m pretty lazy and like the quickness rather than MS and all it’s tabbing. Frankly when it’s all said and done they end up with mostly the same keywords. Or at least that was the case the few times I checked.
I’m a newb and I heard about these two programs and I wondered which one was better. After reading Splork’s review and all of the comments Imma give a try to MNF first. If everything goes as planned then I might think of getting MS later on. Thanks for the post Splork.
I’m just looking for somethingto help me out… I’ve read many reviews for MS and MNF. it appears if you are a newbie MNF is the one to go to.
I’m still left confused. I gues I’m looking for “keywords” that monetize
-:)
Cheers!
@Mike – MNF is the easiest to use. MS is a pain. Both are useful. Personally I am steering away from them and using The Keyword Academy and their Niche Refinery after finding a wad of keywords in Google. That is the best solution for finding “green” keywords IMO.
Thanks for the great review. When I was using MS I was thinking “man I wish there was a way to check all my KW competition faster instead of having 70+tabs”, sounds like MNF is the way to go. MS is slow too, so doing 70 tabs aint efficient.
Thank you Splork for the review..
After days of trying to do keyword research without either of these tools, I am going to go with MNF.
I had heard great things about MS on Warrior, but truthfully time is frickn valuable and the idea of having 70 tabs open still sounds tiring to me.
Much appreicated. FYI. Your title was what made me read your post. Saying you had bought both made it worth reading.
Thanks again.
Ben
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Ohhh my! This is a great post! it gives the good side and the “bad” side of these 2 competing tools. Now, I know what I need to have in keyword tools.