How to Find a Niche for Internet Marketing

For those that are beginning their journey into internet marketing, you are often stumped on two main topics:  finding a great niche as your target, and narrowing down that niche to exclude broad opportunities. Entreprenuers who have a bundle of choices can be said to be in a better position since they could always pick one of their current options at random. However, if you have no idea where to begin with no solid ideas, this can be discouraging before you have really started.

There is no reason you should feel like this. Like many things in life, there are lots of different choices (markets) that are available. Knowing where to look is where people get tripped up. A good niche for internet marketing should have these criteria:

• Strong search traffic to indicate demand
• Proof of internet buyers
• Low to medium competition

I covered a bit about competition in the article How to Do Keyword Research so I will leave that issue for now. Let’s take a look at some resources that are helpful for finding niche markets.

Google Keyword Tool

Many people, including myself, make use of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. There are better alternatives out there, but to look up search volume of keywords, and explore different niches as well as related niches, the Adwords Keyword tool is a good choice.

For example, go to the tool and take notice of the Category line.

From here, you can select very broad niches and narrow them down slowly. The first thing that caught my eye was Finance. After I clicked on that, I decided to narrow my search to Banking. From there, you can see very niche specific searches such as Mobile Banking. Once you have this narrowed down, click search and the keyword tool will give you a list of 800 niche specific keywords. Make sure you are logged in or you will only get a list of 100 words instead of 800.

For Dummies Tutorials

The For Dummies series of books have been being published for almost 20 years. These books are backed up by very extensive market research. Why? Because, if there was no market for that niche topic, then they did not want to spend the valuable time creating the product.

You can go check out the Dummies Store and look through all their niche titles. Years ago, there was almost 1000 books in total for the entire series. Now days, you can find hundreds of titles in smaller sub niches. The totorial series has really thrived by their own market research. Why not do the smart thing and take advantage of work that has already been done? It saves you time!

You do not have to settle on just this series. There are many other tutorial series that are very popular. Any of these should work just fine. If you are looking to create an informative product, reading one of these books and looking at the table of contents can help you set up your own product.

Make Use of Magazines

Magazines that are successful and have been around for years cater to specific proven markets. This is true even if they have lost some of their appeal in today’s age. The way a magazine survives is by the advertising revenue that they bring in, not the subscription itself. If a magazine can not come up with enough interest to cover the cost of product, they will go under. A website is different because they will survive without the requirement of making money.

To take advantage of this, you can head over to Amazon and check out the Magazines subcategory. You can find this under the books category. Ignore the ratings on each of the magazines since these boil down to personal opinion on the magazine. From this page, look at the Bestsellers in the left sidebar. These are updated hourly and are a great way to find new interesting niches that have been proven to sell.

Shopping.com and MySimon

Amazon is a great tool if you are looking at specific products themselves. If you are looking into product categories, I would suggest you head over to Shopping.com or MySimon. Shopping.com has a top searches feature which is very useful and is updated every two weeks. MySimon comes with a nice top products link which you can check out what is hot and selling right now.

eBay

I say again, Amazon is the best if you want to find specific products to market. However, this article is about finding niches so specific products is not our main focus. We are most interested in what type of niche gets consumer engagement. eBay is a great tool at your disposal for the purpose of finding niches with high consumer engagement.

Just like the example with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, narrow down a specific niche. You will then want to go and select the Auctions only tab. This is because you want to focus your time on items that get the most bids. This signals the aspects of the particular niche that gets the most interest. When you get into internet marketing, you do not want to use guesses. You want to find concrete data on who is willing to spend money. A great feature that eBay has is the ability to sort the number of bids by the most first. When you have sorted the list by the most number of bids first, you can get a great idea of what gathers the most interest with the most ready to buy consumers.

Potential Niche Markets

These are just a few ways of brainstorming new niches to go into. Once you get into creating new websites targeting different niches regularly, you may come up with your own tricks. Remember that in internet marketing it is very important to base your decisions off of concrete data, not assumptions.