There are figures all over the place on the internet but most of them can't be particularly trusted when it comes to choosing your niche. At best, you need to take them with a large pinch of salt. At worst, there are figures that you should ignore completely.

1. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
It’s easy to think there’s a formula for internet marketing.
Lots of systems teach you that there’s a sweet spot of between
(say) 10,000 and 25,000 searches per month.
The figures vary – a lot depends on who’s suggesting them.
And they might be mixed in with other figures.

2. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
For instance, if the system is based around Clickbank then there’s
a good chance it will suggest that you use their “gravity” figure.
Warrior Plus has a similar figure – they call it pulse.
Clickbank’s gravity figure isn’t something you can rely on (nor is
the Warrior Plus pulse figure)

3. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
All it tells you is an approximation of how many affiliates have
recently made a sale.
If there’s only one affiliate promoting the product, no matter how
many sales they make the gravity figure can’t go above 1.
So whether they’re regularly selling 1 or 100 or 1,000 or even a
million copies per day, the maximum gravity is 1 because they’re
the only affiliate selling it.

4. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
But if 100 people are regularly making 1 sale each, the gravity will
be 100.
Even if the other product with a lower number of affiliates (and
showing a gravity of maybe 1) is making more sales overall.
Which means Clickbank gravity isn’t a figure to pay any attention
to. With the possible exception of promoting products with a low
gravity that fit with your niche on the basis that there aren’t many
people competing.

5. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
The next figure that gets thrown around is the number of monthly
searches shown on the Google Keyword Planner.
If you’ve got at least one campaign running, it gives you a very
precise looking figure for the number of monthly searches.
If you haven’t, it will only give you a very imprecise range for the
number of searches.

6. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
To be honest, both figures are often wildly inaccurate.
But in much the same way as we believe things that are in print,
we believe the figures we see on screen, especially as most of us
trust Google at least to an extent.
The problem with the keyword planner is that it’s designed to sell
more pay per click adverts for Google.

7. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
There are so many other variables that the figures can be out by
an order of magnitude.
I know that because I’ve had pages where they regularly (year in,
year out) get more traffic than Google says exists.
Not just a few more – sometimes more in one day than Google
says exists in a month.

8. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
Other terms with decent traffic showing on my site didn’t appear in
the keyword planner for months (or even years)
Part of the problem is that the keyword planner isn’t Google’s main
product.
Most people use Google to search, not to check the number of
searches in order to buy an advert.

9. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
Another part is that if Google gave precise figures – even if they
were available – then competitors could learn more about their
business than they cared to reveal.
But the “even if they were available” statement is critical.
Sure, Google have the data.
But processing it into precise figures for every potential query in
the planner would take a lot of computer power.

10. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
So, instead, the figures are an approximation.
Even ignoring other factors like how many other adverts are
showing on the relevant search results – if there are quite a few,
the search numbers would only apply to the ads as there’s a tail off
in clicks the further you scroll down the page.
Plus the figures would be spread out over at least the first page of
the results – so between 10 & upwards of 14 results would get the
clicks spread between them.

11. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
Which means the only figures you know for certain are the ones on
your own stats.
And even those can be misleading.
Some stats (Google Analytics for instance) are based on some
Javascript and will vary depending on how far down the page the
code is and whether every visitor has Javascript enabled.

12. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
Server logs in your control panel will show robots as well as human
visitors.
WordPress Jetpack stats does its best to ignore robots and just
show human views. But even those can be skewed if you regularly
visit your own site without being logged in.
So even figures that should be precise can vary.

13. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
The only real figures I trust are sales.
Someone has paid me money – either directly or as an affiliate for
someone else.
Subject to refunds, those are actual sales and money in my pocket.
You won’t know ahead of time which pages on your site and which
videos you record and which emails you write will turn to sales.

14. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
Without a working crystal ball, that’s just impossible.
And as far as I know, most crystal balls don’t work like that, if at all.
So put your trust issues aside.
Stop using any figures other than sales made as a crutch.
Just do it.

15. Choosing Your Niche – What
Figures Can You Trust?
You’ll be able to work out what works for you.
And you can use the time that you’d previously have spent
checking figures productively by creating new content.
If you’d like more help with this, click this link now.