What is a good niche?
Finding the right niche is probably the hardest part of
starting your online business. And this
may be the most difficult article I write, because it is impossible for me to
tell you what the right niche for you will be.
What I can do is teach you how to do the research that is necessary to
choose a niche where you can compete. My
recommendation will always be to take all the time that is required to make
sure the niche you choose will be a profitable one before you commit to it completely. I know that just raised a few eyebrows
because you have to be thinking how can I found out if it’s profitable if I
don’t commit to it? Well that is the
best thing about the Internet today; there are resources available to you that
make it possible to do nothing more than spend time and zero money to find out
how good a niche really is. But the
research is the key to making it a success, after you have done a few you will
know whether of not it is profitable before you ever start any marketing at
all. More internet battles are lost, and
more potential marketers are lost just because they either don’t think the
research is necessary or they don’t know how to do the research to find a good
niche. Unfortunately they commit to
trying to compete with ebay or careerbuilder because they think if they did it
so can I. There is a lot of money to be
made on the Internet if you just know where to look.
Before we get into all of the options available to us for
testing niches let first take a look at how to research a niche. The first thing that I will recommend is to
keep a pad of paper and a pen with you at all times. I find niches just about everywhere, while
shopping, driving down the street, and most often while having conversations
with other people. My problem is that if
I don’t write them down immediately I will forget what it was as soon as I
start thinking about something else.
Make lists of things that interest you, it is important for the long
term success of the venture that it is something that will keep your interest
for the time required to see it to fruition.
Now that you have your first list, take that list and go to
the Gtrends tool at wordtracker.com and input the list one by one into their
free keyword tool. The tool will
generate a list of keyphrases that people search for and give you an estimate
of the daily search volume from all of the search engines. This list that it generates will be your new
list of keyphrases. Keyphrases are the
exact words that people type into the search engine to find what they are
looking for. This goes without saying
but you need to write down the keyphrases and the number of searches each one
has per day. Overall you are looking for
a niche that you can reasonably estimate that you can get 1500 people per day
to your website using all of the good keyphrases. If you have a decent sales page then you will
be able to estimate that 1 in every 200 visitors will buy from you if you are
selling a direct product, or if you are selling an affiliate product which is
most likely during testing then you will convert approximately 1 in 500.
All we really have so far though is a list of keyphrases and
now we need to do something with them to find the right niche for testing. The first thing you should do is go to
google.com and type in each phrase with quotation marks around them like this
“what is a good niche” hit enter and make a mental note of the first few sites
that come up and also if there are any advertisements at the top (very
important) and at the right side of the search results. If the first few sites that come up are
wikipedia.com, answers.com, or other very highly ranked sites then it will be
very difficult to outrank them for that keyphrase. Now reenter the keyphrases into google.com
this time without the quotation marks.
Write down the names and the page rank of the first 20 sites that show
up in the results. Visit the first 20
pages and see if they are really related to the keyphrase and make note of what
they are selling and for how much. It is
not really a matter of can you compete with them as much as it is a matter of
is it worth competing with them. If the
niche you chose has everything everyone could ever want to know about the
subject contained in a 10 dollar ebook then it is probably not worth the
effort.
Finding a good product for testing is also very important. Remember that you were making note of if
there were advertisements at the top and right side of the search results? If there are advertisements at the top of the
search results this may be a very difficult keyphrase to compete in, not
impossible but it will take more time than if there are not advertisements at
the top. Now is the time to start
visiting those sites, and to find out what they are selling. What you need to do here is find one or two
good products that you can sign up for as an affiliate to sell while you are in
the niche testing phase. It is important
that your market be one that is willing to buy.
The best way to find out if they are willing to buy is to sell them
something. Find a good product with a
page that tempts you to buy.
Decision time. If you
have found a niche with enough good keyphrases to generate 1500 visitors per
day, the competition is mediocre, and there is a good product to sell then it
is time to start testing. First go sign
up as an affiliate for the best product you can find and we will start
generating traffic to test this niche. Using the free resources I mentioned
earlier.
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