Organizing my niche research

I don't know why I'm a little surprised, since I've heard many times that niche researching can be very tedious. I've spent the last few days researching my niche. My niche is an actual tangible product, so my methods may not apply completely towards all niches.

One of the hiccups I encountered while researching is the overwhelming amount of information. I spent quite some time getting off track. So I had to organize myself.

(I started taking notes in Notepad, but that's wasn't very useful when it came to reading my notes. I started keeping it in Microsoft Excel, but I didn't like the idea of having multiple files between my home and work computer.) So I use Google Docs Spreadsheet. I love it! I can easily access it from home and work without having to worry about whether or not I have the latest version open. My way of oranzing is constantly evolving. Right now it's in this format.

Sheet 1: Random notes: other possible niches I may want to pursuse in the future, article titles I would like to write, various ways to categorize my niche product, specific keywords to look into
(I'm sure I will have to find a way to organize this sheet, but everytime a cool thought goes into my head I write it so I don't forget it)

Sheet 2: Competitors
Each competitor takes 10-20 rows & 4 columns:

• website address
• pros of the site
• cons of the site
• notes (how i found the site, # of visits as reported by http://www.compete.com/ [thanks, Brad!])

Sheet 3: Merchants has 9 columns:

• website
• name 3rd party affiliate program/private
• commission
• payment frequency
• number of days to store cookie
• affiliate tracking software
• reports?
• price 1
• price 2
• notes

(price 1 and price 2 are the prices of 2 different items found on all the websites so that I can get a better idea of how their prices stack up)

Sheet 4: Products has at least three columns:

• Category
• Price range
• a column for each of the merchants and how much it goes for at that site