How To Find Your Online Niche - Part 1

The the top online marketers advice is make sure your first internet venture is in a niche that's close to your heart. If you're trying to start an internet business and run it around a 9-5 job, you're less likely to let things slide if your internet venture is also your passion. Sad but true that most of us trying to get going online just "play at it" rather than treat it with the seriousness it deserves. Please don't fall into this trap - remember that this could be the passport to real freedom in your life! So build your first venture around a hobby/passion.

So is that it?

Well maybe - but you need to do a bit of research first. Here's what you need to bear in mind;

1/ Is there a big enough market for you to profit in - on the flip side, is the market already saturated?

2/ Can you make an information product in this niche you can sell?

3/ Can your market be easily reached?

4/ Can you give the market EXACTLY what it wants?

5/ Is there scope to grow your business - and how will you do this?

In this series of articles we'll look at these issues in more detail;

1/ Is there a big enough market for you to profit in - on the flip side, is the market already saturated? If anyone tells you that absolutely no competition is good, ignore them. No competition may well be no market. Bear in mind that you don't have to compete with anyone - you could create complimentary products, and then Joint Venture with other marketers - more on this later.

You need to look at supply and demand here - start in Google (where else?). Type your niche keywords into a Google Search - if your hobby was Cat Health, type this in - how many hits are there? This gives you a rough idea of the supply.

The results on the left hand side are Organic Search Engine Results - ie sites recognized by Google as leading authorities on the topic. Results on the right are pay-per-click results, or Google Adwords to you and me. These people bid on those keywords, and the highest bid gets top spot. Google adwords are a useful guide, because it proves those people are making money, which means people are spending money in that area - good news! If you see no Google Adwords (unlikely) alarm bells should ring - no one is making money in that niche under those keywords.

Don't just give up hope here - go to Free keywords/Wordtracker.com and type in the same keyword phrase - this will give you the daily search volume on that phrase - there will also be a list of other similar searches - go back to Google and try these. The trick here is think like a buyer - if you were looking for that info, what would you type in as a search? People don't always think logically here.

Wordtracker is a terrific free tool which tells you the demand on a keyword phrase - ideally you want at least 500 searches a day to have a big enough market to sell to. To sum up, the Google search tells you the number of web pages on that topic (ie supply) and Wordtracker tells you how many daily searches there are (ie demand).

Important - don't try and start by selling to the "Make money on-line niche" for the following reasons:

1/ This is a hugely competitive market - you'll be competing with very experienced marketers who have huge budgets and probably a massive customer list.

2/ At least to begin with, your copywriting skills just won't compete with the copywriters who operate in this niche.

3/ The make money on line market will be well aware of things like autoresponders, copywriting tricks, (although tricks is not really the word I want here) and so forth, so it will be really hard to get into profit here.

Even more important - please, please don't be put off by the last paragraph - there is huge potential in niches outside the make money on-line niche.

Next, we'll look at information products.

By Ged Mccabe

Don't forget to read: How To Find Your Online Niche - Part 2