How to Discover your Niche

Matthew

Last week I wrote a post here about Making Money From a Niche Blog where I talked about 2 sites which make good monthly incomes from their niches: Guinea pigs and raw foods.

In this post I’m going to reveal the secret for making money from your niche and ways to discover a profitable niche for your business.

Here’s the secret to making money from your niche:

The best “secret” to making money from the internet is find a under-served niche – and serve them with the products and information that they want. In other words: Find a niche and exploit it.

It really is as simple as that….

How to Discover your niche

This is one of the most common questions that I’m asked by my readers and here are my top ways to discover your niche. In this list you may get best results by combining methods to give you more angles and information on your niche.

1. Follow your Passion

This is probably the easiest of the niches to follow: What hobbies, sports or interests do you have that you can talk passionately about? If you’re into golf or football (soccer), excellent, then you’ve already got a starting point. However, these are too a niche for you to make money from, so you need to look for narrower niches. For example ‘how to play your way out of the bunker’ or ‘how to take corner kicks that get goals’.

Or maybe you have two interests which you treat as completely separate. For example say you’re into yoga and you’re into rock climbing. These are two very different activities! But what about Yoga for rock climbers – where you put together exercises especially for rock climbers?

2. Amazon

When you’re looking for a niche to focus on, look for books in the broad subject area that you’re interested in. Let’s take again the example of golf. Going over to Amazon, type in the address search bar the broad niche ‘Golf’ then select a book like I’ve done here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Golf-Dummies-UK-Alicia-Harney/dp/0470018119/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279533351&sr=1-9#reader_0470018119

And then select the ‘Look inside’ feature. Then check the table of contents and you have a whole host of potential niche topics. Eg Swing, etiquette etc.

3. eBay Pulse

Often overlooked as source of discovering your niche, you could look to eBay to find out what’s selling and make a niche out of the products. To find out what’s hot on eBay you can check out the eBay Pulse.

Say for example you take the niche of Baby products, by selecting the category ‘Baby’ you’ll see that the top selling items are ‘Baby Clothes’ – you could further sub divide that into boys clothes or girls clothes. Or by ages eg 0-3 mths 3-6 mths etc.

4. Google

Google is probably the number 1 way of tracking down your niche, however, not by using it’s standard functionality, but by a couple of little known tools together. The first of these tools is Google Trends which basically does what it says on the tin. It provides a list of the most popular searches on Google at any point in time.

Then having found a potential topic, you could then take the search trend item and then search on the same topic in Google.

So, say a hot topic was ‘Tomato’ you could then go into standard Google Search bar and click the ‘More Search Tools’ on the left hand of the screen – Then click Wonder Wheel – you’ll then see ‘niches’ appropriate to your search.

Which will look ike this:

So you can pick a niche from the sub topics. Or drill into each area by clicking on the sub topic to further narrow your niche.

Another way of discovering your niche from Google is to use the Keyword research tool where you could type in the subject of Tomato like we’ve just done and discover topics relating to that search.

Here you can see that the phrase ‘Pruning Tomato Plants’ generates c.4400 searches a month – could you own a niche like this?

The general advice is that you need to look for the small traffic niches c5000 searches per month and not the big ones as it’s likely that the smaller traffic niches will be less served and you’ll have less competition.

5. Magazines

Another source of discovering your niche is look at magazines. Whilst you could go to your local book store or newseller, they’ll only carry a few titles. But, after a few minutes of Google searching I came across this website listing all the 2000 odd magazines in the UK something similar probably exists for your country. Browse the magazines that are available and look for magazines with paid subscriptions (as these are hot prospects and potential targets for your niche).

There’s a sure bet that if a magazine exists for your niche, then there’s money to be made in your niche.

So, what do you think? Anything to add?

Matthew Needham, is a UK based professional interim manager and qualified accountant. He is the writer for The Big Red Tomato Company and member of the Infopreneur.net TIP Team. You can connect with him on Facebook or on Twitter or subscribe to his RSS feed. If you have an business problem or idea you want to chat through you can hire him for a one hour brainstorm/consulting session by Skype or Email.

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