The first step to creating your Niche Empire is to find some profitable niches.
When selling a product, a lot of people make the mistake of developing their product first, and then trying to find a market for it.
Of course, the process should be reversed.
First, find a market that spends money, then find out what they want and give it to them.
Deciding on what product or service you will promote in a niche market should be based on a simple principle. There should be a demand for your product or service. You want to offer something that people actually need, something that will make their lives better, make them feel better physically, make them look better, or help them solve a problem.
The process I go through when looking for new niches to enter is as follows.
For starters, I'm always aware of trends and current events in the real world. I read several newspapers each day, many magazines, both general and niche-specific, I watch the news, I listen to the radio. Occasionally something that I hear or read will stick with me. I may jot down some notes, or draw a diagram to help me remember it. Sometimes I'll call my phones voice mail and leave myself a message.
But at some point I'll have several broad ideas to research. I want to look deeper. And I want to make sure there is a good market for them before I even think about creating a product.
To begin with, I check out the hottest search trends at Google's Hot Trends. At this point I am just looking for ideas.
If I see that a particular topic is hot, I’ll make a note of it and look at more targeted sub-niches later on at more specialized sites (which I’ll show you in just a minute!).
The Lycos Top 50 is another site, like Google's Hot Trends, where I will review the latest trends and look for hot topics to explore further. I will also look at Yahoo! Buzz for ideas as well.
The eBay Pulse site is a great place to start looking at sub-niches. What I will do is select the category first (using the topics I’ve gathered from looking at the previous sites), then look for profitable sub-niches by then selecting a sub-category.
The best chance for success is if I am as specific as possible with my niche selection. In the example below, I don’t want to sell to the “crafts” niche.
I want to sell to grandmothers who enjoy giving their latch rug hooking gifts to their families and friends. Whatever. You get the idea.
Also, I’ll always check the largest stores as well to see what they’re selling. There has to be a reason they are the largest stores. They must be doing something right.
TIP: eBay also puts out a PDF report of their hottest categories each month, available athttp://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdf.
Now that I have some potential sub-niches to work with, I want to see how much of a market there is there.
Just because a sub-niche is popular doesn’t mean people spend money on it.
Amazon is a great place to see what currently exists for any given sub-niche.
Chances are, the more books there are written on that subject, the more that market spends on those topics.
For example:
First I specify “Books” to search. Then I enter my niche, in this case “crafts.”
Uh oh. There are WAY too many books returned. This niche is not targeted enough. It is too “mainstream.”
Much better! There are possibilities here.
We now suspect the following:
1) This sub-niche may be targeted enough.
2) This sub-niche may spend money.
Once you have an idea of which niche you want to target, it’s time to determine its profitability. For this, you would have to use the tools found at:
Or…
Simply type in the idea you have in mind, and press the submit button. You will then be presented with a list of keywords and key phrases that are related to the subject you have entered. Each keyword or key phrase would have an indication of the number of searches that they have gathered from search engine users. The number of searches made for a particular keyword or key phrase is a good barometer of the demand. You’d want at least 5,000 searches for your main keyword.
Here are several other sites you can use to get niche ideas:
Nichebot - http://www.nichebot.com
Shopping.com Top Searches – http://www2.shopping.com/top_searches
AOL Hot Searches - http://hot.aol.com/hot/hot
Google Groups - http://groups.google.com
Craig's List - http://www.craigslist.com
Delicious Popular - http://del.icio.us/popular
Dig - http://www.digg.com
Google Catalogs - http://catalogs.google.com
Google Suggest – http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Technorati - http://www.technorati.com
Also, I'll do several targeted searches in both Google and Yahoo (for example, on the subject of "hobbies").
And of course I will always Google my keywords and check out the competition in the Adwords ads. In this case I pay special attention to the ads that sell information products (or services like mine if I’m selling a service).
Some of the ads will be irrelevant as far as competition goes.
Ok, the next thing I'll do is check how many magazines there are on the subject of my chosen niche.
Ok, the next thing I'll do is check how many magazines there are on the subject of my chosen niche.
There are two places I go online for that:
Magazines.com - http://www.magazines.com
and
At each site, I search by category to find the magazines in my niche.
Obviously the more the better, up to a point.
For example, golf has a lot of magazines, but it's not a good niche by itself. It needs to be more targeted. But in that case I can always get more targeted sub-niche ideas within that topic by looking at the types of magazines for that topic.
The next thing to do to find out more about a niche is to visit the forums. By visiting forums and taking note of what people are most concerned about you can search the Internet for products and services that will help them solve those problems. Gather the information about the topic. Do some spy work.
Ok. By now you should have found a profitable niche market.
There are plenty of sites I use for research in addition to the ones above, but they are usually niche specific. These sites will help you to research practically any niche market effectively. Once you have this process down, you’ll be able to do this very quickly.
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