Complete Guide on How to Choose a Profitable Niche in Just 6 Steps
To be successful online, it is very important you narrow down or find your target niche. Right here, right now, I’m going to show you 6 steps on how to choose a profitable niche to build your online business/brand on.
I believe the reason you want to engage in this research is because you want to have good result (a smart desire I must confess). Therefore, it is important that you follow this guide to the end. Doing so will guide you to find and decide on a profitable niche market to explore. Very quickly, I’ll like to cover the basics.
What exactly is a Niche Market?
Basically, it’s super-focusing your online business on a particular group of people concerned with a particular area of interest. In other words a specialized market. For example, instead of writing about weight loss in general, a niche site would focus on narrow sub-niches like “weight loss for black women under 40” and of course you can also build a smartphone app for the niche.
Benefit of Niche Market
Having defined Niche Market, let’s brush over some of the benefits of a Niche Market, before you consider choosing one.
- A Great Chance to Build Loyalty: Focusing on a niche and offering your audience contents/information, products and services that meets their need portrays you as an authority in that Niche. This makes them follow and trust your recommendations and you’ll become the “go-to-authority” on matters that relate to that niche.
- Less Competitive: Unlike in broad market where competition is high, because niche market is defined, so it’s normally less competitive and targeted towards a ready-made audience who are potential viable customers.
- Promoting a Niche is cost-effective: The best way to explain this: if you have a product targeted towards a selected demographic, you could advertise the product using a Facebook so that marketing budget go a lot further, allowing you to use a more comprehensive media mix.
What Makes a Profitable Niche Market?
Now you know the importance of having a nice, but what exactly makes a profitable niche then? Here’s what I’ve figured out
- Passions or problems existing with the audience in the niche.
- An existing (online) business model you can model.
- An interest in the topic or at least some knowledge on it.
- If there’s competition? It is a GOOD signal.
- Money being spent online, a niche where there’s enough people spending on it already.
- Products you can promote as an affiliate.
- Websites you can get traffic from.
Now let’s go over the tactical steps you should follow to identify and choose a profitable niche.
Step 1: Identify Your Interest and Passion
This is the first and best place to start. An easy way to go about it is to make a list of 10 topical interests and areas you’re passionate about immediately.
Here are a few prompts to help you determine what your interests and passions are:
- How do you like to spend your free time?
- What are you passionate about?
- What catches your fancy?
- What clubs or organizations do you belong to?
- What do you look forward to doing when you aren’t doing it?
- What magazines do you subscribe to?
- What problem do you notice in your field that you can proffer solutions to?
- What topics do you like to learn about most?
Step 2 Identify Problems You can Solve
Now that you have your list of 10 topics in hand, you’re ready to start narrowing down your options. To create a profitable business or brand, you need to first find problems your target customers are experiencing, then determine whether you can actually solve them. The next step will show you how you will identify the solutions.
Step 3 Research: Finding Niche Market Keywords to Work With
Here are few smart medium you can use in determining the problems people are facing in the niche you are about to get into:
Forums:
Quora, or find forums related to your niche, then take a look at the discussions that are taking place. What questions are people asking? What problems do they have?
Trends:
Google Trends, A great free tool to get information about what has happened and what is happening in the niche market.
Keywords Research Tool:
Google Keyword Planner The tool provides lots of useful data related to these keywords (especially if you use this tool while logged into your Google Adwords account) you get the chance to explore different keyword combinations. This can help you uncover popular search terms related to pain points and you get insights into products, services, solutions, how much advertisers are paying to advertise and information related to this niche market.
Step 4 Analyze the Competition in Your Chosen Keywords
Like I said above on what makes a niche profitable, competition isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It may actually be showing you that you’ve found a profitable niche. But you need to do a thorough analysis of the competition.
So at this stage, you’ve already found the niche market you want to work with, and subsequently figured out what keyword you’ll focus on. There are lots of tools available out there for keyword analysis and competition. Here are few of the commonly used tools:
Case Study of Keyword Analysis Using Google Keyword Planner
Brain Dean from Backlinko.com has done a comprehensive guide on using Google keyword Planner you can study it to finalize this step.
Step 5 Determine Profitability
By now, you should now have a pretty good idea of the niche you want to focus on and if you haven’t narrowed your list down to a single topic area, you should have found a few ideas you will like to explore.
It’s important to get an idea of income potential of your niche.
Quick ways to determine how profitable a Niche is:
Are Products Available
If there are products available in your Niche, it is a signal that the product was created based on demand.
You can search for products on ClickBank, Amazon, ShareASale, CJ.com
You can also search for products on Google using this Google search terms.
“keyword” + “product” (replace keyword with your niche topic/keyword).
Finally, do a quick search of your keyword in Google and see if there are paid adverts running on them.
Image of search page with Ads on left or bottom
Are there buyers?
Aside from confirming if there are products available in your niche using the above methods, are people really buying the products created? Are there customers’ reviews on products purchased?
If do a quick search on Google on your niche, are there paid ads in the Google search results? If there are lots of ads you know it’s in demand and more than likely profitable. This will also give you a signal of the competition. There’s a very good chance people are buying from those sellers since they wouldn’t be paying for ads otherwise.
How much is the Demand?
Available products and buyers is a good signal, but the third signal I’ll like to point out is, is there enough demand in the niche? If the niche happens to be evergreen, that is a niche that is not event/time (e.g. health, money, relationship), or maybe there are lots of sub-topics or sub-niches (often referred to as a micro-niches) that you could focus on, then that’s great news.
With all the options above, you should be able to determine if your niche is profitable or not.
Step 6 Decision Time
At this stage, you’ll need to decide if the market is worth getting into.
As a rule of thumb, if you see a ton of highly targeted ads at the top and bottom on search page, with enough product/service available for it, then you know your niche is profitable market to enter.
Don’t waste too much time on making a decision, very quickly, decide if Yes you want to go into the niche or No you want to find another.
Once you find one and decided its a ‘Go!’, pick it and come up with a brand name, select and purchase a domain name with hosting and get started ASAP.
There’s no time to waste time!
Conclusion
One crucial thing I’ll like to point out is, you need to trust the process and yourself.
Make a choice, stick to it, learn everything you need to learn, and stay true to the core work. DO-THE-WORK! You don’t have to be an expert to be success in any niche and finally.
Passion will always keep you going notwithstanding the competition.
It’s the passion behind Zappos that’s made them the driving force behind shoe sales online – even though there are a ton of people selling shoes online.
So, I hope my simple 6-Step guide to finding a profitable niche has got you all excited to get started with your business/brand. Remember, finding your niche is just the beginning.
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