Internet Marketers' Training

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How to find a Killer Niche – Part 1

How to Find A Killer Niche - My Step-by-step Approach to Finding the Best Niches in which to Market a Product or Service.

Selecting A Niche Market

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. The process should really be reversed. Find a market first that spends money, then find out what they want and give it to them.

It is certainly easier said than done, but there are a lot of places online where you can do your market research for free. They’ve done most of the work for you already. You just need to know where to go and what to do to connect all the dots.

When you think you’ve found such a niche market, ask yourself these important questions:

1)      Do you have an interest or passion for the niche? If not, do you think you can develop one? Or will you get bored with it quickly?

2)      Are other people passionate about your niche? If not, do they have a desperate problem they want to solve?

3)      Is the market big enough, but not so big you will have too much competition when you’re just starting out?

4)      Do the people in this niche spend money?

5)      What products are being successfully sold right now to this niche? Can you sell something similar? Can you improve it; give them something they want that all other products of their kind are currently lacking?

What are these existing products in your target niche being sold for? Could you be profitable selling a similarly priced item? Or are your potential competitors selling cheap on the front so they can upsell, cross sell, or make their money on the back-end?

What Are the Differences Between Upsell, Cross Sell, and a Back-End Sale?

Upsell: After they make their purchase (but before they pay), you attempt to upgrade them to a premium version of the offer for more money. (e.g. A fast food restaurant might ask them whether they’d like to “supersize” their order. A movie refreshment stand might as whether they’d like a large soda for only 75 cents more instead of a medium one)

Cross sell: After they make their purchase (but before they pay), you attempt to sell them complementary products. (e.g. a Fast food restaurant might ask “do you want fries with that” when only a sandwich is ordered)

Back-end sales: After they have purchased your product (and paid for it), you follow-up with them at a later date and attempt to sell them a more expensive product that they may be interested in, usually, but not always, complementary to the original product they purchased (e.g. Someone purchases the soundtrack to the Sopranos from Amazon. When the Sopranos mega-anniversary platinum entire DVD collection comes out, Amazon sends you an email to let you know about it and how you can get a discount if you buy from them.)

So Where Can You Get Ideas For A Niche Market To Explore?

Brainstorming and Research Online Resources – Offline

  • Newspaper
  • Niche magazines
  • TV and radio
  • Catalogs and mail order – subscribe to newsletters, purchase inexpensive products, get on mailing lists
  • Tabloids and mainstream media
  • Billboards and other advertising media – watch what other companies are doing offline in all their advertising media
  • Talking to people – at your local watering hole, coffee shop, friends and neighbors, business partners, customers, relatives. Talk to them and OBSERVE. What are their hobbies, their interests, their problems?
  • Books – A greatly underutilized idea-generating machine!
  • Grabbing a pad and pen and going to your favorite “quiet” spot to brainstorm.

Let me show you the process I go through when I’m trying to brainstorm for ideas.

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 record my thoughts on my portable voice recorder; jot down some notes, whatever happens to be convenient for me. Sometimes I’ll call my office 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. So I’ll begin completing the following steps:

Google Zeitgeist – http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

To begin with, I check out the hottest search trends at Google Zeitgeist.

From here I can select:

  • Google Trends – For a broad look at search query data, enter up to five search terms to see relative popularity over time.
  • Trends for Websites – Google Trends for website traffic data. Type in a website address to see visitors by region and related sites visited.
  • Insights for Search – A deeper dive into search query data for marketers and power users. Create your own lists of “most popular” and “fastest rising” queries for different geographic regions over time and by topic.
  • Hot Trends – The top 100 fastest-rising search queries right now (U.S. only). Updates throughout the day.

I can also click on “Year-End Zeitgeist” or “Zeitgeist Archives” in the upper-left corner to look at past trends, especially if I’m researching cyclical or other trends over time.

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 shortly.)

I will also look at Yahoo! Buzz for ideas as well (see below).

Yahoo! Buzz – http://buzz.yahoo.com

eBay Pulse – http://pulse.ebay.com

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.

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 – http://www.amazon.com

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.

Next I may use certain qualifying keywords to discover potential niches. You may have heard these called “discovery keywords”, and they are exactly that.

If you go to Google and type in any of the following keywords (make sure you surround them with double quotes for exact matches)

  • How to
  • How do I
  • How do you
  • How to fix
  • How do I fix
  • How do you fix
  • How to prevent
  • How do I prevent
  • How do you prevent
  • How to cure
  • How do I cure
  • How do you cure
  • How to remove
  • How do I remove
  • How do you remove
  • How to quit
  • How do I quit
  • How do you quit
  • How to get rid of
  • How do I get rid of
  • How do you get rid of
  • How to lose
  • How do I lose
  • How do you lose
  • How to get
  • How do I get
  • How do you get
  • How to stop
  • How do I stop
  • How do you stop
  • learn
  • get rid of
  • fix
  • remove
  • prevent
  • cure
  • quit
  • lose
  • get
  • eliminate
  • restore
  • stop

You can also use the Google Keywords Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal), just make sure you uncheck “Use Synonyms”. You only want exact matches.

Discovery keywords are a great way to find what people are looking to do, solve, or accomplish.

Finally, I like to capitalize on the “low hanging fruit.” That is, it’s always much easier to sell a similar product to one that’s already selling well than to try to enter a market cold. If you research your potential competitors up front, you’re going to get a pretty good idea as to how well they’re doing, both in terms of checking their traffic rankings by Alexa (http://www.alexa.com) and Compete.com (http://www.compete.com), as well as their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads in Google, Yahoo, and MSN (at a minimum). We’re going to cover that in the next section.

For now, let’s recap on some of the resources we’ve discussed, plus add a few more. In Part 2 I’ll show you how to research your niche, a very important part of the process.

After that, I’ll show you a quick way to check the potential profitability of a niche.

Brainstorming and Research Online Resources – Offline

To Your Success,

Layard