I wanted to share what I know and what I’ve learned on How to Find a Niche Market that’s profitable as well as something that would not be boring me.
The purpose of this article is to present various examples of Niche Marketing Tactics and Case Studies that I’ve learned in the past few years. I don’t claim to be a guru in Niche Marketing, and Affiliate marketing, but I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned from others and my own experiences as well working as an SEO and PPC Specialist.
First, What is A Niche Market
By definition, a niche market is a small market segment. There are many advantages of targeting niche markets rather than broad markets but here’s a list of why many people love niche markets or niche marketing:
1. You can quickly develop a website and quickly promote your products and services online.
If you’re able to find “untapped” and “hidden” niche markets, there will be less competition on those niches, allowing you to dominate this niche faster than saturated niches.
2. Targeting Long Tail Keywords in Niche Markets can dramatically improve your traffic and conversions.
These long tail keywords might have less search volume, (traffic is lower than big chunk keywords) but they are easier to rank in the search engines, and they also convert a lot higher than other keywords.
Conversion is the single most important metric to measure in your online business.
It shows you if a website visitor converted to your goal. Did they subscribe to your email list? Did they purchase your products and services? These are just some examples of conversion goals that you should constantly measure. No need for fancy tools and paid tools. Google analytics is a Free Tool that you can use to measure goals and conversions on your website.
3. There’s a huge opportunity to become an Authority in Niche Markets.
And Authority is the name of the game nowadays. Authority websites are loved by the search engines. It’s one of the reason’s why Google is pushing out Google+, which is their own social network integrated into search results. They want “experts” writing articles on the web, and they want to reward your efforts with more visibility, traffic and exposure.
Depending on the niche market that you’ve chosen, you might find some niche markets are quite competitive. This is the reason, why you need to do proper market and keyword research before you even start buying your domain. A lot of niche marketers fail, because they’ve chosen the wrong market, chosen the wrong keywords, or have chosen both.
Here are Some Niche Market Ideas and Other Examples of Niche Markets
For picking Niche Market Ideas I would go to Amazon’s Best Sellers List to Find out what’s hot right now. As of this moment, I’ve noticed that “Waterproof Video Camera’s” and “Image Stabilization Binoculars” are selling like hotcakes.
If these niches interest you, feel free to grab them. :) – Just email and thank me later, when you’ve made your first sale from these niches. :)
I will use “waterproof video cameras” and “image stabilized binoculars” as niche examples below.
Some people also uses pulse.ebay.com for finding hot niches, but I just use Amazon’s best seller’s list most of the time.
How To Find Niche Markets Within Your Expertise
If you haven’t selected a niche market yet, I would recommend going with niches wherein you have some sort of expertise or experience. This can help you a lot, especially when you’re creating articles and writing content.
It’s easy for me to write about market and keyword research because I’ve been doing SEO and PPC for several years, but if you would like me to write about pets or gardening, I won’t be able to create content that would be appealing with my readers.
That is why, I would always go look for niches within my level of experience and expertise.
A great exercise to help you find profitable niches within your expertise is to check the following:
1. Family Business – I assume that there is some sort of informal training between a parent and their children. There could be tons of niche opportunities within the family business. Maybe they haven’t use the internet yet to promote their products and services. Maybe you can create courses and seminars on how to educate other people who would like to learn more about the business.
2. Educational Background – What did you study for in college? university? – As a nurse, my first experience with online marketing is when I’ve shared my knowledge on test taking skills for nursing exams. This was my first taste of success in the world of internet marketing. And the nursing niche has been a money maker for me ever since. Some of the greatest niches are in the *education niches (hint hint)
3. Career Background – Where did you work before? What are your work experiences? I believe that every work has a hidden “niche” potential. You have to be extra sensitive on the needs of other people (client’s and coworkers), and you’ll be able to find some niche market potentials.
And last but not the least, avoid hunches and gut feeling without data.
I’m a PPC Specialist so numbers and data matters a lot to me.
If there’s no demand for the product or service that I’m creating, then I wouldn’t put a lot of time and effort on this niche market.
It’s not unusual that you’ll select niches that you think are profitable but will turn out to be a lemon.
Niche Market Selection is a process, but it can be learned with enough time and practice.
and what I would like to do next, is to help you speed up that learning process.
which brings us to the most important part of Finding Niche Markets
How To Do Market Research And Keyword Research
There is no fixed criteria or formula that determines if a niche market and keyword research would be profitable or not. If there were, then a lot of niche marketers would be rich. But what I’ve learned from many people and what I’ve done for my own niche websites is simple, I can actually summarize it into 3 steps.
STEP 1. Find a Specific Market with Specific Needs
STEP 2. Create the Products or Services that Addresses these specific Needs.
STEP 3. Promote and Put the Product in front of them (Website, Traffic, Advertising, Promotion, Etc)
That’s my 3 Step Plan to Dominating Niche Markets.
Of course, there are specific details in each step, but that’s the entire overview.
Let me explain it further with an example.
Let’s say you wanted to create a niche website about losing weight and you have a product that can help people lose weight.
If you try to target “everyone” that “wants to lose weight”, you’ll FAIL, big time.
Why?
Because some people are trying to lose weight by…
Surgery
Exercise
Diet
Magic Pills?
Even if your website ranks for keywords like “lose weight” and “lose fat”, you’ll have High Bounce Rates on your sites and you’ll see that your site’s conversions will suffer.
So the best way to do market research for a niche market is to identify a specific subset of the bigger market.
I usually start with Age Group – What are the ages of people that I’m targeting?
Gender – Are they mostly male, female or both?
Biggest and Specific Problems – What problems do they have that needs solutions?
Other factors – Do they have the capability to buy my products or services? Are there competitors who are willing to advertise their products and services to these demographic market?
Let’s continue with my example.
If I’m going to promote a product on losing weight, I’ll choose female, because I believe they are more interested to losing weight than men.
But we’re not YET done…
I want to target a niche of women who wants to lose weight…
Some ideas that comes into my mind
ladies who wants to lose weight before marriage
girls who wants to lose weight before prom date
women who wants to lose weight after pregnancy
Now depending on your expertise, I’ll most probably choose the niche on women wanting to lose weight after pregnancy. I think they would fit my criteria of urgency and capability to invest in my products and services.
How To Find Niche Keywords and Check if there’s Sufficient Demand (Market) for it
For this part, you’ll need to either Market Samurai or Google Keyword Tool to find the Search Volumes for your Niche Keywords
Remember to use the [Phrase] or [Exact] Match when selecting keywords.
If you choose Broad match, you’ll miss the REAL search volume of these keywords and your keyword analysis might give you inaccurate numbers.
Always remember to choose either Phrase or Exact match when finding keywords for your niche website.
You can also use Google Keyword tool to find Niche keywords, and make sure you still select either [Phrase] or [Exact] Match when finding keywords.
Notice that I’ve selected long tail keywords (keywords that have at least 3 words in it) here. I would then check the SEO Competition of these keywords.
If the SEO Competition doesn’t look too competitive, then you can optimize for that keyword. It would be easier for you to rank keywords that have less competition. This means that you just need a little bit of promotion in order to rank for these terms.
Long tail keywords may have less search volumes, but they are also less competitive, allowing me to rank easier for long tail phrases even if my website is less than 1 year old. It’s also converting a lot higher because these keywords are very specific. You’ll immediately know what information the reader wants.
Usually I choose the keyword with the highest search volume as my “domain name” or “categories”. I don’t disregard any keyword that has search volume of 100 or more. I would also group keywords together that are similar in context and meaning.
This will allow me to combine the search volumes of these keywords giving me more traffic each month, while allowing me to rank faster in the search engines. This strategy has worked well for MarketSamuraiProdigy as well as my other niche websites.
How to determine the REAL SEO Competition of your Niche Market
The best niche markets are filled with tons of competition, but you should not worry about this because there are still tons of great angles and hidden opportunities even in the most difficult niches. But you also have to be realistic with your time, expertise, and expectations.
You can definitely go after the harder and competitive niches (internet marketing, losing weight, etc), but you need to be realistic with how much time and resources you are willing to dedicate in order to become an authority in your market.
And the way I determine the Search Engine Optimization difficulty of my niche market is by checking the Top 10 Results of my chosen keywords.
Why? Because the Top 10 results are already ranking for my targeted keyword.
The search engines have rewarded these sites with Top rankings because of the Internal and External Factors these 10 sites have.
The SEO Metrics that I always check includes:
1. Domain Age – The older the domain, the harder the competition. If you are competing with 10+ year old domains and your site is new, forget this keyword because they would be very hard to outrank.
2. Backlinks to the Pages and Domain – Backlinks are still the Biggest reasons why a website ranks in the search engines. But after the Penguin updates, you have to be careful with the type of links you point to your websites. Spammy and low quality links can hurt your website if it triggers a Penguin or Algorithmic penalty.
3. Index Pages, Referring Domain Count, Meta Data Optimization,etc – I also check how many pages does my current competitors have, are the Title and Meta Descriptions optimized, how many referring domains, and some other less important SEO factors.
I use Market Samurai to Check on the SEO Competition for these keywords, but before I was using firefox and semrush extension to check this site metrics one by one.
Going to back our Market Research from the Amazon Bestseller’s list, I’ll check the Search volume for “waterproof video camera” and “image stabilized binoculars”
Niche Market Example :
WATERPROOF VIDEO CAMERA
SEO COMPETITION
Niche Market Example :
IMAGE STABILIZED BINOCULARS
SEO COMPETITION
I’m going to tell whether I think this Niches are competitive enough or not. But I guess, I’ll let you answer that question in the comments below.