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.
Try using Google Alerts the next time you find yourself running out of ideas of things to write about in your niche market.
Content as we all know is king, but when you are trying to write two, three, or more articles every day about your niche market, it can be more than a little challenging.
Eventually, after writing several hundred articles, you simply run out of ways of saying basically the same thing.
But what if someone else provided you with a different slant about something in your niche market?
Someone else’s opinion could give you something fresh to write about. Or at the least, make you think about it in a different way.
This is where Google Alerts comes in.
Google Alerts is a free online service that monitors the Web for interesting new content and automatically delivers the content to you based on the keywords you provide.
Based on your queries, Google Alerts updates you via email on the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.).
The service allows you to create a filter to keep spam out of your inbox.
You can specify which messages you don’t want by simply identifying keywords that are contained in the messages.
However, when you create a Google Alert, you can also identify the words found in the content of the messages that you do want to receive.
Google will send you a list of search results with the keywords you identified in them to your inbox.
The problem is that the Google Alert only recognizes a single word at a time.
This means that if you want to get links to content that uses the long tail keyword Mosquito Lagoon Fishing; Google Alerts will send you search results for the single words Mosquito, Lagoon, and Fishing.
Although some of the search results will be exactly what you are interested in; many topics will be just for “Mosquito”, just for “Lagoon”, or just for “fishing”.
You could get links for Mosquito repellant, Mosquito traps, Mosquito netting or for Lagoon Cinema, Disney’s typhoon Lagoon Water Park or for Fishing hats, fishing lures, etc.
You can then create a filter for Google Alerts and have all the results go into a folder that you’ve created for that purpose.
The next time you find yourself running out of ideas of things to write about in your niche market, you will have a ready resource of material to draw on to help you create some fresh content.
Try using Google Alerts to create content the next time you’re running out of ideas and need a fresh slant.
You may be surprised at what shakes out!
Never underestimate the power of article marketing for generating income from your website.
There is a lot of home based internet marketing information available online about free advertising methods.
Some of these are effective and some are not, but you can be sure that writing and distributing articles on the Internet is a powerful, proven method of not only getting your website noticed, but also a way to make money writing for other Internet marketers.
You do not have to be an “expert” writer to make money writing articles. You just have to be able to put your views and experiences down on paper in an understandable format, like writing an essay when you were in school.
That is the real power of article marketing.
Communicating your thoughts to others in a simple straight forward manner without extraneous verbiage.
The most successful article marketers also know how to inject their copy with specific keywords. They learn how to communicate their thoughts to human readers as well as to the search engines.
Many new to article marketing initially find this type writing difficult if not impossible. However, like anything else in life, the more you practice, the easier the words flow.
We recommend writing articles on a regular schedule, at least one or two a week on different topics.
The more unique articles you crank out and submit to the article directories, the easier it becomes.
You will find that after a surprisingly short period of time your articles will become more professional and other Internet marketers will be knocking at your door for more content.
Unique article content is always in demand and pays handsomely.
The power of article marketing increases with consistency.
The more articles you submit to the article directories on a regular basis, the faster your reputation as an “expert” writer will grow and the more money you will generate.
Once you build a name for yourself as an expert in your field, you will be able to generate an income for your business.
The power of article marketing exponentially increases as your readers increase, which is why it is imperative to submit your articles to the article directories, targeted forums, etc.
You can manually submit your articles or purchase software that automatically makes the submissions for you.
The goal is to have as many people as possible read your articles.
Article marketers write articles for a variety of reasons.
The main object of writing and submitting multiple articles is to pull people to your website.
This is accomplished by including your website URL, your name, and your copyright clause in the Author’s Resource Box.
You can also set up a Google Alert with the Author’s name you use in your Resource Box. Pen names are common, so you don’t have to use your given name as the Author.
A well written article with carefully chosen keywords strategically placed throughout the content will get readers and the search engines to your website. This also builds back links that will improve your page rank.
Ezine owners select content from the various Article Directories and Forums. Once your article is selected and published, your website really gets exposure.
The more articles you get published, the more well known you become and the easier it is to make money writing your articles.
This is the real power of article marketing.
Unfortunately not everyone has the ability or the desire to engage in article marketing.
If you are in this category, you always have the option of either hiring a ghost writer or purchasing Private Label Rights and rewriting the content to create fresh, unique articles.
