How To Find A Profitable Niche Part II
Hopefully by the time you are reading this you have had time to explore the keyword tools mentioned in part I. If not click here for the link to that post.
In addition, you also need to determine how much competition that niche already has. If there are too many sites that are catering to that niche, it will make it very difficult for a newcomer like yourself to enter into that niche and make it worth your while to continue catering to that niche.
The only way you could enter a niche with a lot of sites already catering to it is if you can provide something to that niche that those other sites can’t or haven’t already offered to that niche. It will take additional research to determine whether there is something you can offer that these sites don’t offer already; you’d need to check out their sites for a period of time, sign up to their lists and check out their offers, perhaps order something from them to see how their customer service is, etc., in order to determine what you can do better to satisfy that niche market.
So while you can enter a high-demand niche that has a large number of suppliers if you provide something different from the rest, it would be easier for you if you can find a high-demand niche that hasn’t been tapped into yet.
To find out how much potential competition you would have in a niche, you should select around 5-10 keywords based on that niche (like we did part I with Chihuahuas) and enter them into the Google search engine. This will provide you with how many website search results there are for each keyword, which will help you learn how many sites are already catering to this niche.
Opinions vary on how many site return results are too many, but obviously, the smaller the number of sites that is returned, the better. Generally, if you have between 5 million and 1 billion sites returned (plus a high number of searches yielded, as described above,) there’s probably potential for niche marketing. If the number of sites returned is between 1 million and 5 million sites, so much the better.
However with this many searches keep in mind that you are looking for a sub-niche within those millions of searches. Otherwise you are looking at a massive amount of competition. If you can find a sub-niche with between 75,000 to 150,000 searches you have a much better chance of success.
You don’t want the number of sites returned to be too small because this could indicate that there is not enough of a demand in that niche to provide a product/service to, which is why there aren’t that many suppliers to begin with. Again, you’d have to do additional research to determine whether the low number of sites is due to an untapped niche or not enough demand to market to.
One way you can determine this is by visiting forums related to your niche market and see what type of problems they are having and what solutions they are looking for, as well as see what type of solutions are already out there.
A good way to find these niche market forums is by inputting the name of the niche (ex. Chihuahua) along with the word “Forum” into a search engine like Google.
Once you have found a niche market that has enough demand and a limited enough supply, you can then begin marketing your product/service that meets that demand to that niche market.
How To Find A Profitable Niche Part I
To succeed at niche marketing, you have to find a profitable niche. This means you have to find a niche that has a high demand for a product or service that is either not being supplied at all or is not being supplied enough AND that YOU can supply.
To do this, you need to find out what people are searching for on the Internet. There are several online tools that can assist you in determining what people are searching for on the Internet; WordTracker is one such tool.
WordTracker will estimate how many searches are made in a day on Google on a particular subject. You certainly want that niche to have a high number of searches (500 or more would be a good benchmark for most niches,) or otherwise, the niche would not be a good niche to market to because you’d never have enough demand to get enough traffic to your site to make enough sales to support your business. That is why you need to make sure the niche you are thinking about marketing to has enough demand to support your business.
Make sure to try different keywords based on that niche: for example, for Chihuahuas, you may want to try keywords such as:
Chihuahua
Chihuahua dog
Chihuahua dog care
Chihuahua dog food
Chihuahua dog owners
etc.
Google also has a great keyword tool, and you can find that here. Give both of these tools a try to begin learning how to search and find a profitable niche.
