How to find a niche market

By: Nick Dalton

Setting up a profitable business on the web has never been easy, but it seems to become harder every year. One of the most important decisions you have to make, at the very start, is to find a product in a market segment that can be profitable. It should be a product in a niche market where the competition is not very strong.

But how to find such products and niche markets? It's not just a question of being creative, because you have to find products or services to sell to real people, surfers that need your product.

Why not have a look at the exact words that people type in when looking for a product? In Google, when you type in keywords without pressing 'enter', Google suggests words to complete your phrase based on actual phrases that people have been typing in. Basically you see which keyword phrases are being searched for. It sounds logical and you can try it out immediately, for example with 'how to'. The first I got in Google when writing this article, was 'how to save a life lyrics', 'how to kiss', 'how to download from youtube' and others. Not very promising at first glance, but the important point here is that these are phrases that actually have been typed in, many times. In Yahoo I got different phrases, like 'how to tie a tie', 'how to lose weight', 'how to draw' and 'how to control anger'. No niches in sight, so far.

The phrase beginnings are important. 'How to get better' gives better results and there are many more. 'How to cure', 'how to buy', 'how can I', 'learn to' and 'tips on' are definitely worth checking out. We can also give the first letter of a keyword. For example: 'learn to a' gives 'learn to airbrush', 'learn to act', 'learn to airbend' and other phrases. The strategy is extremely simple yet very powerful: we try to get a lot of potential niches and then we use other tools to determine if something can lead to a profitable niche. It's not difficult to come up with at least twenty different and powerful beginnings, and we can also mix beginnings to have even more variants.

The second step, as already mentioned, is to determine which keywords have potential, and are worth digging deeper into. There are some questions we can ask, e.g.: is there a magazine named after it, are there forums about it, is it something that people are passionate about, are there people buying products related to it? A 'yes' to many of these kind of questions means that it could be a profitable niche. But take care: avoid niches that are too competitive, there are tools and techniques to sieve the less competitive out of it.

The third step is finding products in that niche. You can go to forums related to a niche and find out where people are talking about and what they desperately want. You also learn about some of the problems related to that niche. Having a look at the questions that people are asking at Yahoo answers can reveal what people need.

The technique may seem too simple to work, but it does, and even better than I expected. If you have some spare minutes, try it, you might be surprised...

Nick Dalton has been on the internet as a marketeer since 2000. He has assembled some of the most simple and powerful techniques to promote an internet business. You can find these on Web Promotion Advice. Don't miss this one!

Article Source: http://www.marketingarticlelibrary.com

Please Rate this Article

Not yet Rated