In the last post I talked about some how you might go about getting ideas for niche marketing.  Affiliate marketers depend on niche marketing to bring them steady incomes over the long-term, and the strategy is to develop a number of niches so that you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. That said, if you want to profit from niche markets, you need to know how to find them. Fortunately, this can be done in just a few easy-to-follow steps.

If you read the previous post you have probably got a number of ideas for potential niches. Now you need to decide which ones to work with. Here are 5 steps to help you get started.

1.  It helps if you have some interest in the niche you are considering as this will motivate you to work on it. Choose a general industry that interests you, such as health, weight loss, dating, shopping, etc. Yes, these are broad but you’re going to whittle them down to specific niches you can target.

2.  Ask yourself what sub-markets exist within the industry you chose. For example, weight loss might have the sub-markets of people who want to lose weight through diet, people who want to lose weight through exercise, or people who want to lose weight with little or no effort.

3.  Choose a product to promote that falls into one of these sub-markets.

4.  Keep whittling things down by asking yourself what type of people might be interested in the product you’re promoting. For example, people who want to lose weight through diet may want to do so for swimsuit season, to prepare for a wedding or high school reunion, because their doctor told them they had to, etc.  These are your potential niche markets.

5.  Find which one of these niche markets is the hottest by entering the keywords you think would be associated with it into Google. Do not use single word keywords here because they are much too broad and it will be next to impossible to compete. Surround the keywords with quotes ( a phrase search). When you get your search results returned to you, look for results with less than 10,000 organic pages returned, but with three or more paid ads on the right-hand side of the page. These are hot markets with little competition, and you should promote them.

Remember, as I mentioned earlier, you can profit from more than one niche market at a time. Set up several campaigns to keep a steady flow of money coming in.

In future posts I’ll be going into this in more detail. Cheers

When you are getting started in niche marketing, you need at least 20 or 30 ideas for niches before you start sreening them to see which ones might be profitable. You might have some ideas but in case you have difficulty here are some suggestions for how you might come up with some ideas for niches.

1. Magazines
   Go into a newsagent and have a look at the magazines that are on sale. If the magazine has been in publication for a number of years, the chances are there is a solid niche. Another source of ideas is to browse through magazines and see what the articles and advertisements are about.
2. Your Hobbies and Interests
   These can sometimes be good niches because you are more likely to be consistent when the work involves something you enjoy
3. Things you are an expert in
   You might have some skill or knowledge that could be the basis of a niche market. Do your family or friends often ask your assistance, advice or opinion on something?
4. Newspapers
   What is in the news? What ads are being run?
5. Amazon
   Check out what the best sellers are on Amazon. You can also see what magazines they list.
6. Ebay
   You can check what is on offer and what is selling (completed auctions). Additionally the ebay pulse lists the 10 most popular search terms.
7. Forums
   If you belong to any forum, you may find some questions or topics of problems keep occurring. These might be potential niches.
8. Yahoo Answers
   As with forums, maybe there are some recurring questions that could provide an idea for a niche.
9. Google Groups
   Each group shares a common interest so there may be many niches here.
10. Subscribe to Niche Idea emails
    There are many websites where you can sign up to receive a daily or weekly email with a suggestion for a niche.

These are jsut a few suggestions. If you choose to subscribe to emailed niches, one of the better ones, in my opinion, is Daily Niche Idea. Not only do you get a good suggestion for a niche but you get articles you can use and suggested products. Best of all it’s free.

Click Here To Visit Daily Niche Idea

Knowing how to find profitable niche markets is one of the keys to affiliate marketing success (and that is what this site is all about).

As I mentioned in my previous post, many affiliate marketers who are just starting out choose to focus their efforts on broad categories, such as clothes or jewelry or money making products. However, there is so much competition in these broad categories that it’s easy for your efforts to get lost. Further, when potential customers do internet searches for broad terms like these, they’re usually in the very early stages of their purchase cycle. In other words, people usually do lots of research on products before they buy, narrowing down their search words each time to be more and more specific, until they find exactly what they want. You want to catch people at the end of their buying cycle, when they know what they want and are ready to purchase it.

The more specific you can get with your market focus, the better chance you’ll have of attracting buyers. So, instead of focusing on “wedding dresses,” focus on a very narrow market, like “modest wedding dresses” or “spring wedding dresses.” It will be easier for your marketing efforts to stand out when you use niches like these, and your chances of making a sale will be much higher.

It’s also best if you can find niche markets that have a lot of hungry buyers. In fact, the more desperate the buyers, the better your chances will be of selling to them. Finding hot niche markets with ready buyers isn’t difficult. All it takes is some basic research. Scan the headlines of magazines and see what themes develop among the article titles. Chances are, these are the topics people are interested in. Then, search the Internet for information about these topics, using narrow search terms. If you get lots of results returned to you, including paid ads, then you’ve found a hot niche.

Although I am using the term “niche” here, what we really mean is “niche market”. After all, the niche you are concentrating your efforts on is the one you hope will make money for you.

There are two ways of looking at or defining a niche or niche market. The first way is to consider it as a specific subset of a broader market.  For example, the broad market might be “golf players”. Within that market there may be niches such as “women golf players”, “left handed golf players” etc.

The second way of defining a niche is to say that it is a group of people who share the same problem. This is, I think, a better way of looking at things because when you look at the niche that way, you then consider how you can help them solve their problem. The only way to make money reliably in the long term is to help people.

A niche can be as broad or narrow as you want. The earlier example of golf players could be considered a niche in itself although it is a fairly broad one. When you are considering niches you need to keep in mind how targetted you want that niche to be.

Most people start off thinking that a broad niche is better because it appeals to more people. While that is true, a broad niche is also much harder to  focus your efforts on. Your advertising (website, printed brochures, print and online ads etc) needs to appeal to all the possible people that fall within your target niche.

So, if your niche was golf players, you would be trying to appeal to men and women, left- and right-handed players, beginning and experienced, etc. Obviously, this is impossible to achieve. Not to mention that your product (or solution) range would be very large to try and satisfy the different requirement for each of these people.

On the other hand, if you decided to focus on left-handed women golf players it is much easier to write ad and web copy to appeal to that segment. And, your product range will be specific to that segment. Sure, the target audience is very much reduced but having a more precise solution or product offering and more appropriate advertising means you are not competing against fewer people and your niche should be profitable – provided you do the other things right.

Now, I’m not saying you should start marketing to that niche. There is a number of other steps you need to take to evaluate the likely profitability of any niche before you invest time and money into developing it.

I’ll be discussing these other steps in subsequent posts.

Cheers

–M

Hi this is Michael and welcome to my site. What I aim to do here is to cover techniques, tools, products and methods that will help you to discover and develop niche markets.

Like me, you have probably bought lots of ebooks and other things all claiming to show you how to make millions from niche markets and you’ve been disappointed. My aim on this site is to provide real value and I will be discussing free and paid tools or products that can help. Even though I may earn a commission on a product if you purchase through my affiliate link, I am NOT going to suggest any product that is not useful and effective because I don’t want my name associated with low-grade products.

I will be starting with some basics, so if you are already familiar with the initial material please bear with me. I just want to make sure everyone has a common grounding.

If you have comments, suggestions on things to cover or anything else, I’d love to hear from you.

Stay tuned.

Michael