Finding Your Profitable Niche
Last time in this series on getting started online we looked at developing the right mindset. I hope you didn’t skip over that post. I know that talk of setting goals, developing a winning mentality, and expecting positive outcomes isn’t very exciting to most people but it really is critical to your success at anything.
If you didn’t take time to read my last post I urge you to do so now, before you think of anything else, it really is that important. As any builder will tell you the foundations are the most important part of any building project. It won’t matter how spectacular the architecture above ground is, if you didn’t start with good solid foundations the building will collapse in a heap around the workers as the weight becomes too great for poor foundations to support.
It’s the same with our business. The reason that the failure rate is so high is because the proper foundations weren’t laid in the first place. I promised you that in this post I’d cover domain names and choosing your niche. Let’s start with finding your profitable niche because this will make choosing your domain name easier.
Your First Niche
OK, I’m assuming that you have read my last post, have your end goal in mind and have given some thought to how you want your business to look. What we’re going to do now is decide what niche we want to build our first site around. If you’re like any me you’ll have lots of ideas buzzing around in your head for potential niches and that’s OK. You will be working on one only so you need to have a process in place to filter all of your ideas through so you arrive at the one that you are going to work on first.
That’s a very important point by the way. You need to develop a discipline to work on one idea, one project at a time. Trying to manage several niche ideas at the same time will only delay your success and you don’t want that.
Step 1
There’s been a lot of debate over the years around whether you need to have an interest in your chosen niche or not and there are lots of supporters for both sides of the argument. I feel that if you can arrive at a niche idea that you do have some interest in you will find working on your new business a lot more rewarding than if you select something that you have no interest in at all. So I tend to favor the ‘something you’re interested in’ viewpoint. However, not all hobbies or interests will be profitable so you need to have a way of evaluating their profit potential. I’m going to show how to do that here.
Start by making a list of all of your hobbies and interests. Include those that you have now, ones you had in the past and ones that you would like to take up but haven’t gotten around to yet. Add to your list skills you have from your current and past employment. Are you an expert in a particular field that others may want to gain advice in. The health niche is a very profitable niche so if you have any health practitioner skills you may be able to develop a successful online business around those skills.
Another good source of niche ideas are magazine racks. Running a magazine is very expensive. They normally only survive by running lots of ads, and people will only place ads in those magazines if they make sales from them. That means that every magazine in the rack is a potentially profitable niche for you. When you’re out and about check out the magazine racks and list down all of the subjects you find there.
I spend a little time skimming through some that I find interesting while I’m in the store because often there are ads inside that identify a sub-niche within the main magazine topic that I might not have thought of. Here in the UK you find lots of people actually spend time in the store standing by the magazine racks reading the magazines who don’t go on to buy them so it’s easy to just spend a little time flicking through a few magazines. You may not be able to do that where you are.
(My tip: Keep a little notebook with you all the time so you can note down any niche ideas that you see. Once you get into the habit of thinking niches you’ll see them everywhere, and if you don’t note them down straight away, chances are you’ll forget a lot of them by the time you get home. Don’t let a winner get away!)
From now on when you’re watching TV, don’t go off to do something else when the ads come on. Make a note of them, there could be some profitable niches there too. Check out billboards, ads on taxis, buses, trains, anywhere. Keep building your list, it will prove to be your goldmine.
If after all of this you still have difficulty coming with niche ideas then I have another couple options for you. Amazon, the biggest online marketplace, provide best seller information. Just type ‘Amazon Best Sellers’ into Google and you’ll be able to browse best selling products on Amazon by category. This will provide a goldmine of niche ideas for you.
Another option is to look at one of the affiliate networks for ideas. One that I suggest is oDigger. (www.odigger.com) Browse around odigger and you’ll see lots of affiliate offers in all sorts of niches to get ideas from.
Next step
Now you need to filter out the good from the not-so-good. Work through the niche ideas on your list and ask the question, is this topic evergreen or not. In other words, is it something that people are interested in over a long period or is it a fad, or something with short term interest. For example, if your topic is losing weight then you can say yes, this is something with an on-going interest. There are always going to be people who want to lose weight. On the other hand if your topic is a model of iPad then it will only have relatively short term appeal because there are new models coming out all of the time and most potential buyers will want the latest version.
Once you get a system going you can look at short-term products and make good money with them but while you’re learning the ropes it is better to go for something that has long lasting appeal.
Passion
The next filter is passion. Is this niche idea something that a lot of people are passionate about, and more than just passionate – are they insanely passionate about it.
Repeat purchases
Is this niche idea something that people buy lots of products in? Are they repeat purchasers? Is it something that they just can’t get enough of. Quite often when people have a hobby they want to buy everything they can about their hobby. They buy books, videos, gadgets and gizmo’s, magazines etc. Can you see how you could put together a whole line of products to sell to this market group over time through what we call a sales funnel. Could you start them off with a low entry point product and build up to more value and higher priced ones gradually over time? This is what you are looking for.
Demand
Completing the last few steps will probably have slimmed down your list quite a bit so that you now have less items to work with. The next thing you need to identify is the demand for any of your potential niches that you have left. To do this you will use the Google keyword suggestion tool. To get to it you just need to search on Google for ‘google keyword suggestion tool’ and it will probably be the first on the list.
To find the demand for any of your niches this is what you do. At the top of the screen below ‘Find Keywords’ you will be invited to enter a word or phrase into a box. Take the first niche idea on your list and type it into this box. For example if your first idea was knitting you would type that into the box. You may already have dug a bit deeper though and decided that knitting patterns was a good potential niche in which case you would type knitting patterns into the search box.
(My Tip: You will notice that you are asked to type in a (almost impossible to read) captcha each time you do a search. The Google keyword tool is part of Google AdWords. With Google you use the same username and password to log into any of their products so if you have a Gmail account, log into the keyword tool with your Gmail username and password and you don’t have to enter the captcha each time. Saves a lot of frustration.)
Over on the left side of the screen you will see a list of match types. Check the exact match box and uncheck the broad match one. You want to see the demand for the exact term you entered. Having typed in your search term click the search button. You will be presented with a list of related keywords and phrases to the one you entered. Look out for words or phrases that suggest a desperate need to solve something, things that people are having difficulty solving themselves.
Make a note of the items on that list that have 2000 – 5000 local searches a month. There is a column headed competition. This relates to competition for the keyword on Google AdWords not necessarily your competition online. A high competition keyword will mean that your clicks will cost you more on AdWords. Unless you’re planning on running AdWords campaigns (which I don’t recommend until you are a lot more experienced) the competition rating isn’t anything to concern yourself with.
The more you drill down into sub-niches the better you will do because there will be less competition.
Having completed all of that you will be able to identify a niche that has high demand, has lots of people wanting to buy products or services about it, hopefully is something that you have some interest in and is evergreen.
This is a skill that you will build on as time goes by. There is always more to learn about niche research, new techniques and software programs to help you out. If you’re starting out on a shoestring then this method will get you started. If you have some money to invest in your business I recommend SECockpit for niche research. It’s not a cheap solution but one that I wouldn’t be without because it provides me with so much information including whether there’s a suitable domain name available to match your chosen niche.
Domain name
Once you have settled on your niche, it is relatively easy to find a domain name to suit. It used to be the case that having a domain name that matched exactly, or as closely as possible, your main keyword was recommended for good search engine positioning. This was known as ‘exact match domains’ and was what we all tried to achieve with our niche sites. The reason being that having an exact match domain did give you a real advantage with Google.
In one of their latest updates, Google have downgraded lots of sites with exact match domains which has caused some people to suggest that having exact match domains is now bad for your sites. I don’t agree with this view. I believe that the reason that lots of sites suffered in the update was because they had little or no content on them. Before the update it was possible to create an exact match domain site with only one or two pages that linked to an affiliate offer and rank very well and make money.
From the affiliate’s point of view this was great but it wasn’t good for the searcher and this is what Google is concerned about. They want everyone searching for information in their search engine to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible. To be honest, that is what we should all want. As marketers it is our responsibility to provide good information. There is also a long term benefit when we do. Bigger sites, known as authority sites, with lots of pages of informative, valuable content will gradually get lots more visitors and stay around at the top of the search engines for a lot longer.
So to get back to domains, it is fine, even still beneficial to have an exact match domain if you can provided you are prepared to create lots of good content. So having decided on your niche, decide from the list of results that you get in the Google keyword search tool what your main keyword is going to be and look for a domain that matches it. There are lots of cheap places to register your domains. Godaddy is one of the most popular places to register your domain and you can get a special offer through this link Go Daddy®.com.
OK, so we now have a niche that we are going to work on, we have decided on our domain name and we have options for where to host our site (remember my offer of free hosting for this first site). Our next step is to create our website which we will look at next time.
until then,
‘Remember nothing happens until we take action’
regards,
Trevor
