Starting a niche online business is the most inexpensive way to start making money from advertising and by promoting affiliate products. Using only a few hundred dollars, your determination, and hard work, you will be able to create web sites with a sustained income. It’s not a “get rich quick scheme.” However, most people don’t have a clue about how to start a niche online business. I am starting a series with a step-by-step guide on how to start building niche websites for generating cash.
Definition of Niche Marketing: Niche marketing is defined as marketing products and services that cater to a particular group of people. This group wants to solution to a problem they’re experiencing or they have a passion for a specific thing. Always remember that people buy stuff to solve a problem or they have passion for certain thing and want to spend their money to fulfill that passion.
For example, somebody will buy an acne solution product because they are suffering from acne problem, on the other hand, a person may buy remote control cars because it is his hobby and he spends a substantial amount of his earnings on his hobby.
Finding Niches – Market Research. As a niche online business wannabe, your job is to find niches that must fulfill two criteria – a demand and a commercial possibility. This step is known as market research. You have to find a niche that has good demand and people in that niche are ready to spend money. For example, “weight loss” niche is highly in demand and people are ready to spend a substantial amount of money on losing weight.
Most often than not, many newbie internet marketers will jump into a high demand niche like “weight loss”, build a site and expect people to rush over to their sites to make purchases. High demand niches are also heavily dominated by experienced internet marketers. They have spent years to build authoritative sites to drive traffic from organic searches and pay per click (PPC).
If you’re going to use PPC to drive traffic to your site, you can enter a niche dominated by longtime players. But my advice for newbies is to not go into PPC marketing unless you’re a quick learner and have a deep pocket.
Your goal as a newbie is to spend as little as possible and drive as much traffic as you can for free.
Instead of going into a broad niche like weight loss, you can specialize in a small subset of weight loss niche like post pregnancy weight loss. This small niche has substantial demand but big players will not be interested because it will not generate large amount of cash everyday.
How to Find a Niche. Before we start delving into how to find a niche, I will list a few niches for our discussion to start.
- Traffic Tickets
- Magic Tricks
- Wedding Themes
- Spiritual Healing
- Sweating
- Dream Interpretation
If you want me to give you more niche ideas, post a comment and I will reply. Also refer to my blog post 21 Super Hot Niches For Affiliate Marleting.
You can generate hundreds of niches that have substantial demand. I have discussed a few niche marketing strategies in How To Select a Niche Marketing Strategy to Make Money Online.
- 1. Use Amazon Best Sellers. Think about a broad niche and search Amazon Top sellers in that Niche. Can you come up with a micro niche from a larger niche? If you see a Dummy’s book on a small niche, you know that small niche has a good demand. Dummy’s publisher spends lots of money doing market research and you can leverage their efforts to your advantage.
- You don’t have to restrict yourself to information products only. Search for top selling products in any Amazon category and you will get plenty of ideas. I searched best seller in Health Mind and Body Category and found a book about how to reduce belly fat, micro niche in weight loss niche market.
- Also, check out dummies.com site.
- 2. Walk Around Your House. Write down every item you see, e.g. chair, table, tooth brush, perfume, rugs, cupboards, etc. These are some broad keywords and you have to find a smaller niche from these broader niches. Now go to Google AdWrods Keyword Tool and enter broad keyword in the search box.
- You’ll see a list of keywords with search volume. Sort them by descending order. Any search volume greater than 30,000 searches is a good niche. I entered chair and found rocking chair, a smaller niche from a broader keywords.
- 3. Check Daily Newspaper, Magazines, and TV for niche ideas.
- 4. Talk to your friends, coworkers and family members for their hobbies. As I mentioned earlier in the post, people spend lots of money on their hobbies.
- 5. Visit the magazine section of your local super market and browse through some of the magazines you are interested in.
- 6. Think about seasonal niches like Easter, Valentine’s Day.
- 7. Check Clickbank Market Place, Affiliate Programs Directory, and New Affiliate Program.
- 8. Check out eBay pulse, cnet buzz report, consumer demand index,and Trend Watching.
I use a product called Micro Niche Finder. It helps me find micro niches by clicking a button. It will also help you in your keyword research which I will discuss later. Click here if you want to buy Micro Niche Finder. When you go to their landing page, it will ask you for your email, if you don’t want to give your email, just click the link below the email box to buy it directly.
Home Work: Write down in a spreadsheet 10 niches that have more than 30,000 search volume. Check Internet Retailer’s top 500 list and find retailers that have an affiliate program and selling products from your niches.
We will continue this series. More to come: Keyword Research, Commercial Intention, Buying a Domain, Setting up a Blog, Content creation, link building and much more.
Ask any questions in comment and I will answer them.
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