Niche Market Research

A niche market serves a highly targeted group of customers.  Why do successful markets focus on tiny niches instead of creating super-sites?  Because sites that focus on a tiny segment of a larger market can be developed and promoted quickly.  You can rank a whole lot easier for a small set of keywords than trying to capture a large number of them.  Plus, when you get down to the tinier markets there is less competition.

The key to niche marketing is to do your research.  You have to find people that are looking for a product or service to solve a problem.  Once you know what the audience's problem is, you have to find products that solve hat problem.  The perfect niche is one that finds people who are desperate for a solution to their problem and are glad to pay to have it solved.

What do you need to know about a niche and if it's a good one for making money online?  The four things that I look for are:

Identify the Audience and their Problem

You want to be able to put together a picture of the members of your niche.  Are they male or female?  How much do they make in a given year?  What do they worry about?  Do they have kids or significant other?  What do they do for fun and for money?  What are they having problems with?  What solution are they looking for?  Get as specific as possible, that way when you are marketing to this person you can identify with their situation as closely as possible.

How Important is it to Solve the Problem?

You want to find people who are desperate for a solution.  If someone has a few dandelions in their yard they might not be in a huge rush to get rid of them.  If that same person has spiders infesting their house and biting their children you can bet their is a high urgency to find a solution.  The more important a solution is to the audience, the more likely they are to buy something from your site.

Can You Solve Their Problem?

I don't mean that you personally have to be able to solve their problem.  Are there products or services out there that do?  Can you become an affiliate of those products?  Do they pay out a high enough percentage or flat fee to make it worth your time?

Do I Like this Niche?

Some of you might not think it's important to have an interest in a niche as long as it makes a lot of money.  I disagree.  How are you going to spend hours of your life on something that you have no desire in learning about?  Are you going to be able to write articles on the topic if it bores you to death?  Pick something you are interested in and it will show in your finished product.

How to Do the Research

So now that you know the questions that you need to ask before deciding if a niche is worth going into, you might be asking how exactly I go about figuring out the answers.  There might be other niche research methods out there that I don't know about, but I use these myself and can attest to their usefulness.

Forums - Do a google search for "(your keyword) forums" and check the results.  Go into the forums and see if you can find a recurring question from users.  If you see the question pop up multiple times, you know it's popular.  If you see a thread about a problem getting a lot of views then again, lots of people are interested in the topic.

Yahoo Answers - This is very similar to finding forums.  If you go to Yahoo Answers you can find questions from people all over the world.  You can dig through the site to find the categories you are researching, or use the search tool to find your keywords.  See if you can find a common pattern of questions being asked.  Those are the topics that you want to find solutions for.

Google Hot Trends - The great thing about Google is they will tell you what people are searching for most frequently right now.  These hot topics are obviously very popular and if you can give searchers a quick solution, then you can generate a lot of traffic quickly.  The problem is that a lot of the searches are general in nature and about news topics.  Is Bill Cosby dead is an example.  I'm not sure how you could make money off of letting people know he's still alive.  However the Princeton Review's best party schools for 2010 could generate a lot of traffic if you are targeting 18-23 year olds.

Clickbank - A great method for doing niche research that will quickly allow you to see if there are also relevant products is to search Clickbank.  There are thousands of merchants looking for people to help sell their products.  You can scroll through the categories or enter a keyword into the search box.  A couple of other decent sites built off of the clickbank marketplace are CB Engine and CB Analytics.  Those sites both display stats for Clickbank products in a user-friendly fashion.

As you can see, properly researching niche markets isn't all that difficult.  With just a little work, you can find profitable niche markets where you can make money.

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• How to Build a Niche Site