For many newbie Internet Marketers, the first roadblock they run into is finding a profitable market niche to pursue. This problem need not be that difficult once you understand the process and some of the tools that are available to help you.
Before we get into some specific tools and strategies, I want to point out a few important questions that you should ask yourself about any niche that you are thinking of pursuing.
Niche Smell Test:
- Do they have money? If you are targeting a niche that has a ton of searches, but the searches are done by 8 year-olds, making money is going to be a challenge. Your niche must have access to a credit card.
- Are they easily reachable? Do they have forums? eZines? Blogs? Is there a Google Group? (groups.google.com) If you can’t find an online community, you will have a hard time learning about, and interacting with, the customers you are after.
- Are they online? If they don’t buy the product you want to sell online, move on.
- Are there discussions going on in the forums that indicate buying interest? Spend some time in the forums during your research phase. If you don’t see any threads that indicate buying interest, move on.
- Do the competition give me the ability to promote their products? Competition is a good thing. Lack of it is bad! Let’s face it, if you are really into gardening, don’t you think you are likely to buy more than one book on it? I don’t know about you, but I have read a TON of books on marketing, and I will continue to read more because the learning never ends.
So with all that said, now lets examine a few of the strategies and tools that I used when I’m looking for a new niche.
I start by thinking about macro trends:
- What is going on in the economy?
- What season is it? What season is next?
- What are the baby boomers up to?
Thinking about these trends gives me clues as to what categories of products I might want to research.
For example, in this economy, many people are facing financial hardship so an info-product that addresses how to go bankrupt, or how to avoid foreclosure, would see demand.
Once I have a few ideas, I need to start to research and find out if other people share my interest and there are a number of tools that I use to find and research niche ideas.
eBay Pulse
eBay Pulse delivers a snapshot of the eBay marketplace. eBay Pulse features top 10 popular searches, popular stores, popular products, highest priced and lowest priced, etc… On the home page, you can see the top 10 popular searches and you can also drill down into a category of your choice. It also shows you the most watched items. The great thing about ebay is that not only can you see what is selling, you can become an affiliate!
To use eBay Pulse, start by choosing a category that interests you and click the update button. You will then be able to see the most popular searches within that category. You will then just be able to keep drilling down into a category and each time, the most popular searches will be shown. Keep going until you find an opportunity that is of interest to you.
Amazon.com
Amazon is a fantastic resource for product ideas and there are several ways that I used it. First, I visit the magazines section and sort them by bestsellers. Doing this allows me to see which topics are of the most interest to people.
Once I know which topics are popular, it’ll give me ideas for products that might sell to that market. At minimum, it will give me another avenue to start my search for products that might sell to that market.
For any category on Amazon, you can search by bestseller. Once you’ve done that, go ahead and click on a few products. Do they have a lot of reviews? If they do, that means plenty of sales have been made.
If you figure that probably one in a thousand buyers takes the time to leave a review, 768 reviews suggests that a very large number of sales have been made. Clearly, dog training is a hot niche market! However, the term “dog training” is probably too competitive for you to achieve a first page ranking for, so you will need to find a micro-niche with less competition. I will cover how to do this in an upcoming post.
Another thing I like to check on Amazon is how the book ranks overall in terms of sales versus other books. Luckily, Amazon provides this for us. To get this information, all you need to do is scroll further down the page until you see the information below. As a rule of thumb, I am looking for a rank of somewhere between 5,000 and 150,000. Higher than that, and the competition will be intense, to say the least.
As with eBay, the great thing about Amazon is that you can become an affiliate and promote anything the sell.
Google Search-Based Keyword Tool
This is another wonderful tool that shows the volume of searches by category, or by keyword. When searching by keyword, it will also give you suggestions for other related keywords (this is one of the techniques I use to find micro-niches) I use this tool both to find niche ideas (browse the categories) as well as to check the search volume of certain keywords to see if there is sufficient demand. As a rule of thumb, I look for at least 2,000 [Exact] searches per month. (keep reading to learn what I mean by [Exact] searches)
As you can see from the screenshot above, there is a great deal of valuable information available from this free tool!
Google Adwords Keyword Tool
Another awesome free tool that I use to check search demand and get ideas for alternate/related keywords is the Adwords Keyword Tool. I also use this tool to check out the difference between Broad, “Phrase”, and [Exact] search volumes. As you can see in our dog training example below, the search volumes are substantially different.
A Broad search term is any keyword phrase that contains the keywords you have chosen in any order. For example if someone where to search for “marathon training with my dog”, that counts towards a Broad match for our “dog training” keyword, but they definitely aren’t looking for a dog training guide!
A “Phrase” match is the keywords in any order. So it could be a search for “training dog” or “dog training”. An [Exact] match is just that and is your best indicator for the number of searches for the traffic you are going to target initially. Over time, as your site gains authority, you may start to rank for the “Phrase” and Broad keywords and get even more traffic, but don’t count on it initially.
Other tools that I sometimes refer to include:
- Squidoo Top 100 Lenses
- Magazines.com
- Google Insights for Search
- Yahoo Answers
I also like to go to forum for a niche and see what questions are being asked – this is the seed for the free report and it will also tell me what they are likely typing into a search engine.
Ok, so to summarize, what we’ve covered in this post are some of the free tools and strategies that you can use to find profitable market niches. We do have one major problem however: these tools don’t tell us the strength of the competition on the first page of Google and knowing this is absolutely critical to niche market selection.
In future posts, I’m going to show you:
- how to evaluate the competition to determine if you can get on the first page of Google for a given keyword
- how to determine what URL’s might be available for your chosen niche
- how to determine if that niche is commercially viable
- how you can use a piece of software, called Market Samurai, to do all this and more and save you a TON of time.
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Who’s Trent?
Having sold his last business for over a million bucks in 2008 by the age of 38, Trent has since immersed himself in the study of internet marketing by going out and doing. Continue reading...
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