Discovering Profitable Niches
Discovering profitable niches is perhaps the most problematic aspect of Internet marketing for beginners.
Unless you already have an idea in mind, you’ll need to spend some time looking for a product or service that you can profit from and that can be successfully marketed to the public.
Discovering profitable niches requires some serious investigation.
Although the ideal scenario is to find a product or service that everybody wants and that has very little competition in the marketplace, your personal interests are also important in deciding what niche to market.
Profitable new niches are always available, but it takes some brainstorming to discover them.
You can begin by first looking at some existing Internet marketing campaigns to see if you are interested in what is already being offered to the public.
Then you have to decide if you might be able to fit in to supplant the existing niche.
Since it is much easier to successfully market something that already interests you rather than to try to market something you know little to nothing about, it’s a good idea to first discover what your interests are.
Although this seems trite, many of us don’t even think about what we are interested in until we are asked. We just seem to “know”.
A good way to identify your interests is to get a pencil and paper and jot down the first dozen or so subjects that immediately come into your mind.
Don’t wast time over thinking them, just jot them down as they come to mind.
When you have your list, you will have a good idea of what your areas of expertise are.
The next step to discovering profitable niches is to see if your interests are in line with what your friends and collages are interested in.
Just because you are interested in something does not mean that the public at large would be interested in it. Your idea must be marketable.
Friends and associates can give you some good ideas during the normal course of conversation about mutual interests.
When a subject come up that could become a potential niche, take note of it and jot it down.
The sole purpose of this exercise is to generate ideas for you to explore that could become a profitable niche market.
Part of discovering profitable niches is determining how much online interest is associated with the words and phrases that you compiled in your lists.
Your compiled list is basically a list of “keywords” and “keyword phrases”.
The next step is to do some basic keyword research on your ideas and personal interests so when you have completed your list of subjects, hit your computer and start doing some Google searches on them.
When using Google to research your keywords, there are some tips to remember.
When you enter your keywords in the search box, first click on “Web” to get the search volume of the keyword. This lets you know how many other people online are interested in your topic.
Next click on “Search tools”.
This pops up additional links to refine your search.
“Any time”, “All results” and another link to your local area allow users to see when and where people who searched for their keyword are.
If you click on “More”, another drop down menu allows you to further refine your search.
On the right of your search results page is a gear icon that when clicked provides you with a drop down menu that also farther refines your search results.
Look at “Search settings”, “Advanced search” and “Search help” to refine your results.
Play around with all the options until you have an idea of which niche is of interest to a majority of people.
In addition to Google searches, there are several well known, easy to use word tracking search engines available online that can facilitate your research.
When you find a great deal of interest in a given subject or related topic, you can delve further into that “keyword” to determine if it could become a foundation for a successful marketing campaign.
For example. If one of the interest on your list happens to be “horseback riding” and it returns 18 million hits, you have a broad subject to explore.
By refining your search to “horseback riding lessons”,”trail riding”, “pony riding”, “horseback riding boots”, “horseback riding DVDs”, etc. you have discovered several potentially profitable niches that you may be able to market a product or service in.
Keep in mind that just because a phrase has relatively few hits, it does not automatically eliminate it from becoming a successful niche to market.
For example, if a return for “horseback riding DVDs” only yields a few hundred hits, look at the actual title tags before discounting the niche.
You may discover that a large number of people are looking to buy DVDs for horseback riding online. That could become the target of your new marketing campaign.
Often, something that seems completely off the wall will lead to an interesting concept where you can fill a need and initially encounter only a relatively small amount of competition.
So, when discovering profitable niches, remember that there is no such thing as an idea that is too crazy to look into.
