How To Find A Niche
Finding A Niche
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.
Of course, the process should be reversed.
First, find a market that spends money, then find out what they want and give it to them.
Deciding on what product or service you will promote in a niche market should be based on a simple principle. There should be a demand for your product or service. You want to offer something that people actually need, something that will make their lives better, make them feel better physically, make them look better, or help them solve a problem.
The process I go through when looking for new niches to enter is as follows.
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 jot down some notes, or draw a diagram to help me remember it. Sometimes I’ll call my phones 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.
To begin with, I check out the hottest search trends at Google’s Hot Trends. 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 in just a minute!).
The Lycos Top 50 is another site, like Google’s Hot Trends, where I will review the latest trends and look for hot topics to explore further. I will also look at Yahoo! Buzz for ideas as well.
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.
TIP: eBay also puts out a PDF report of their hottest categories each month, available at http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdf.
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 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.
For example:
First I specify “Books” to search. Then I enter my niche, in this case “crafts.”
Uh oh. There are WAY too many books returned. This niche is not targeted enough. It is too “mainstream.”
Much better! There are possibilities here.
We now suspect the following:
1) This sub-niche may be targeted enough.
2) This sub-niche may spend money.
Once you have an idea of which niche you want to target, it’s time to determine its profitability. For this, you would have to use the tools found at:
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
Or…
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
Simply type in the idea you have in mind, and press the submit button. You will then be presented with a list of keywords and key phrases that are related to the subject you have entered. Each keyword or key phrase would have an indication of the number of searches that they have gathered from search engine users. The number of searches made for a particular keyword or key phrase is a good barometer of the demand. You’d want at least 5,000 searches for your main keyword.
Here are several other sites you can use to get niche ideas:
Nichebot – http://www.nichebot.com
Shopping.com Top Searches – http://www2.shopping.com/top_searches
AOL Hot Searches – http://hot.aol.com/hot/hot
Google Groups – http://groups.google.com
Craig’s List – http://www.craigslist.com
Delicious Popular – http://del.icio.us/popular
Dig – http://www.digg.com
Google Catalogs – http://catalogs.google.com
Google Suggest – http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Technorati – http://www.technorati.com
Also, I’ll do several targeted searches in both Google and Yahoo (for example, on the subject of “hobbies”).
And of course I will always Google my keywords and check out the competition in the Adwords ads. In this case I pay special attention to the ads that sell information products (or services like mine if I’m selling a service).
Some of the ads will be irrelevant as far as competition goes.
Ok, the next thing I’ll do is check how many magazines there are on the subject of my chosen niche.
Ok, the next thing I’ll do is check how many magazines there are on the subject of my chosen niche.
There are two places I go online for that:
Magazines.com – http://www.magazines.com
and
Amazon – http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/599858/
At each site, I search by category to find the magazines in my niche.
Obviously the more the better, up to a point.
For example, golf has a lot of magazines, but it’s not a good niche by itself. It needs to be more targeted. But in that case I can always get more targeted sub-niche ideas within that topic by looking at the types of magazines for that topic.
The next thing to do to find out more about a niche is to visit the forums. By visiting forums and taking note of what people are most concerned about you can search the Internet for products and services that will help them solve those problems. Gather the information about the topic. Do some spy work.
Ok. By now you should have found a profitable niche market.
There are plenty of sites I use for research in addition to the ones above, but they are usually niche specific. These sites will help you to research practically any niche market effectively. Once you have this process down, you’ll be able to do this very quickly.
Understanding Your Target Audience
Ok, now that we have a niche, it’s time to figure out the psychographics of your target market.
According to Dictionary.com, psychographics means “the use of demographics to determine the attitudes and tastes of a particular segment of a population, as in marketing studies.”
In simpler terms, it means looking deeper into your niche market, so you can serve them better by customizing your products.
Answer a few questions… but I warn you not to answer them too quickly. This takes a lot of thought and consideration to do correctly.
Question: Who would like to buy what you have to offer?
Don’t just say ‘Women’. That is a gender identification, not a target market. All women are not alike. They have a wide variety of lifestyles, values and interests.
Don’t just say ‘Golfers’. That identifies a group of people who partake of a sporting activity but it’s not a target market. Among golfers there are huge differences. Are you targeting the ever so often golfer with a cheap tips video or are you targeting the lifestyle golfer who travels regularly to play in competitions.
Be very specific. ‘Start up Fundraiser Coaching Professionals”
Question: Why is he/she interested in what you have to sell?
Don’t say ‘She will like it because she is a Mom’ because there are no products that ‘all moms’ are interested in. (Unless it’s an Artificial Intelligence Housekeeper and I think even then you’d get a few naysayers.)
Be very specific. ‘Start up Fundraiser Coaching Professionals” will want to secure this product because it contains the tricks and skill builders they need to attract their first clients.’
Question: What stage of life is she in?
• Young & Single
• Young & Married
• Young Motherhood
• Middle Motherhood
• Late Motherhood
• Empty Nest
• Older & Single
• Older & Married
These stages of life are important factors in identifying a target market. How you choose to communicate with your potential clients, you will need to take this information into consideration.
What motivates a young married woman isn’t going to motivate an empty nester.
For example, if you want to reach young singles you’ll probably want to use graphics and promotional materials that look trendy and highly relative or popular to modern day media.
On the other hand, to reach older married people you will choose a more traditional style and convey a stability that will resonate with older consumers.
Question: How much money does he/she have to spend?
• Frugal
• Average
• Upper Middle Class
• Wealthy
Financial income brackets are one of the most important issues in choosing and communicating with your target market.
The financially strapped customer will be attracted to messages that imply that they’re getting a great value or saving money.
Wealthy customers will be more interested in hearing that your product is made of the best ingredients and created for distinctive tastes.
Some individuals will only be interested in products that clearly demonstrate that they’re cheaper than everything else. They’re so driven by their tight budget or their personal commitment to frugality that they’ll choose one product over another on price point alone.
And in the other extreme, there are consumers who will purposefully choose the most expensive service provider on principle. Maybe even just to be able to say that they hired the priciest ‘most exclusive’ provider – or perhaps because they believe that the higher cost surely means that they’ll get the best quality. (Which may or may not always be the case!)
For some, impressions are everything.
Can you see how it would be literally impossible to create one sales message that rings true with all markets?
Well, that’s it for this section. Now you should have your niche and understand who it is you’re targeting. Next we’re moving on to setting up a website and finding ways to monetize it. I’ll write that thread tommorow, so for now – GET BRAINSTORMING!
