Pick A Niche

The Killer’s Guide to Niche Sniping

A Step-by-Step Approach to Finding the

Best Niches for Stuffing Your Pockets Fat

By X

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You should be aware of any laws which govern business transactions or other business practices in your country and state. Any reference to any person or business whether living or dead is purely coincidental.

Selecting A Niche Market

A lot of marketers make the mistake of picking their product first, and then trying to find a market for it. Or they pick a product to promote that looks good without KNOWING who’s going to buy it. As a marketer you need to learn that your opinion doesn’t mean much – if anything. If you want to have an opinion about marketing, start a blog.

The process must be reversed. First, find a market that spends money, then find out what they want and give it to them.

It doesn’t get simply than that – and at the same time it’s advice “easier said than done”.

Fortunately for you and me there’s a boatload of places online where you can do your market research for free. Even better, most of the work has already been done for you. You just need to know where to go and how to connect the dots.

When you think you’ve found your golden niche market, ask yourself these questions to see if you have the real thing or fools gold:

1) Do you have an interest or passion for the niche? If not, do you think you can develop one? Or will you get bored with it quickly?

I know people who don’t care about what they promote – they only care about the money. That’s fine but I prefer to enjoy the process of doing what I do. I think it’s important to care about the quality of what you do and the people you do it for. Without passion, I don’t think that’s possible.

2) Are other people passionate about your niche? If not, do they have a desperate problem they want to solve?

It should be noted that “passion” is derived from the Latin word “patior”, meaning to suffer or to endure. Where you find people suffering, you find an opportunity driven by a strong motivation to help people. You also want to find people who are strongly enough attached to an outcome that they are willing to endure.

It can be difficult to imagine a golfer or a fan of your favorite athletic team as “suffering or enduring”, but it’s true when you think about it.

The golfer keeps playing and playing and playing – and striving and seeking and buying – enduring – because of a burning dream and desire to accomplish something at the game. Sport fans come back year after year, through winning and losing. And as an Oakland Raider fan, I can tell you I’ve been suffering for a while.

But you’re looking for the type of people willing to dress up, spend big money and act like an idiot even when things stink.

3) Is the market big enough, but not so big you’ll have too much competition when you’re just starting out?

I don’t advise diving into bigger markets until you really know your stuff. Although carefully selecting a niche within a niche – and taking a carefully considered position can overcome some daunting odds.

4) Do the people in this niche spend money?

If the answer ain’t YES homey, move on.

5) What products are being successfully sold right now to this niche? Can you sell something similar? Can you improve it, give them something they want that all other products of their kind are currently lacking?

In short, it’s about more than slapping up an ad with an affiliate link. Do you have some value to add?

6) What are these existing products in your target niche being sold for Brian? Could you be profitable selling a similarly priced item? Or are your potential competitors selling cheap on the front so they can upsell, cross sell, or make their money on the back-end?
What Are the Differences Between Upsell, Cross Sell, and a Back-End Sale?

Upsell:

After the customer makes their selection (but before they pay), you attempt to upgrade them to a premium version of the offer for more money. (e.g. A fast food restaurant might ask them whether they’d like to “supersize” their order. A movie refreshment stand might ask if you’d like a large soda for only 75 cents more instead of a medium one)

Cross sell:

After the customer makes their product selection (but before they pay), you attempt to sell them complementary products. (e.g. a Fast food restaurant might ask “do you want fries with that” when only a sandwich is ordered)

Upsell = “supersize it”
Cross sell = complementary item

As an affiliate, your hands are somewhat tied with upselling although you could offer a webinar series that shows someone how to utilize a product. “If you buy this software, then I will offer you my ‘How to Make Money with Webinars’ training for half price.

Cross selling is also something you can as an affiliate, though of course not at the time of the sale – instead, “I told you how important autoresponders are last week, and here’s a service that provides proven pre-written messages for you”.

If you have a product, you can also get in the game here by promoting someone else’s product as an affiliate and then having that “hot” product promote your product as a cross-sell.

Back-end sales:

After someone has purchased your product (and paid for it), you follow-up at a later date and sell them a more expensive product they may be interested in, usually, but not always, complementary to the original product they purchased (ie, someone purchases an affiliate marketing ebook and you later promote a DVD course, membership site, live training, coaching, complementary service, etc)

So Where Can You Get Ideas For A Niche Market To Explore?
Brainstorming and Research Online Resources – Offline

* Newspaper

Problems, crises, special events (tickets, transportation, lodging), news that helps you sell a product

* Niche magazines

The content of the magazine is the buzz that draws the bee to specific advertising content. It’s not just a matter of what’s being sold in the magazines – pay attention to how the magazine is sold (that would be the cover).

The highest paid copy writers in the world all work for me – and it doesn’t cost me a red cent. Magazine headlines make some of the best Adwords ads.

The point I really want to drill home here though is the point that magazines exist for ONE reason – to make money. Magazine publishers make their money by selling ADVERTISEMENTS. If the content of the magazine isn’t appealing, then the magazine sits on the shelf and advertisers don’t pay for that.

I think I wrote this someplace else, but it’s such a super-simple secret – I picked up a travel magazine one day and was surprised that most of the ads in the mag weren’t for travel – they were for expensive designer watches. Obviously the seller’s of watches have found their target market are travelers. I hope you get this point.

* TV and radioAgain – what’s the hot topic? I know people who’ve done very well just watching what Oprah promotes (yeah, it’s a good excuse for men to watch a chick show too). What many TV advertisers haven’t caught on to yet is that most people would rather visit a website than call an operator. This is an opportunity for you – whether the product being promoted is available online or not, people ARE looking. If the specific product doesn’t have an affiliate program – no problem. Find a substitute.

* Catalogs and mail orderSubscribe to newsletters, purchase inexpensive products, get on mailing lists. Learn to LOVE your junk mail. This is a golden secret. ALL of my best performing affiliate offers are marketed via direct mail.

* Tabloids and mainstream mediaThe world is full of lemmings. Watch the lemming leaders.

Brainstorming Ideas

Let me show you a process for brainstorming ideas.

For starters, be aware of trends and current events in the real world. Read newspapers, magazines, both general and niche-specific, watch the news (but be careful not to get sucked into the black abyss of negativity), listen to the radio.

Occasionally something you hear or read will stick. You can record your thoughts on a portable voice recorder, jot down some notes – do whatever happens to be convenient. I know some people like to call their voice mail and leave a message.

You’ll generate several broad ideas to research. But you want to look deeper before investing time and money.

Begin by completing the following steps:

Google Zeitgeist – http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

Check out the hottest search trends at Google Zeitgeist.

From here you can select:

* Google TrendsFor a broad look at search query data, enter up to five search terms to see relative popularity over time.

http://www.google.com/trends

* Trends for WebsitesGoogle Trends for website traffic data. Type in a website address to see visitors by region and related sites visited.

http://trends.google.com/websites

* Insights for SearchA deeper dive into search query data for marketers and power users. Create your own lists of “most popular” and “fastest rising” queries for different geographic regions over time and by topic.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/Insights is a great tool to get familiar with. It will show you rising trends by industry in a geographic location. And it can reveal things going on in the world in an industry that most may not be aware of.

For example, I just did a search for “tennis” and found that it’s a hot topic in Australia right now. When I click on Australia I see that’s because the Australian Open is occurring.

Although the Australian Open gets it’s share of publicity, this is a good example of how a current event in another part of the world could be bringing greater than normal attention to a subject.

It also shows, specifically, WHERE in Australia the topic is showing the most interest. This is an effective way to target your ad spends to the places most likely to produce results using PPC. Or, while your Adwords competitor is spending his budget worldwide, where interest is average, you can choose to focus all of your budget – at a higher cost per click – in those areas where demand is strongest.
* Hot TrendsThe top 100 fastest-rising search queries right now (U.S. only). Updates throughout the day.

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

Don’t discount things that look inane. Last time I looked at Hot Trends “renaissance festival” was top 50. I know someone who built a successful membership site for people who like to go around and play King Arthur.

You can also click on “Year-End Zeitgeist” or “Zeitgeist Archives” in the upper-left corner to look at past trends, especially if researching cyclical or other trends over time. Some products are much more seasonal than others.
More Idea Sources

At this point you’re just looking for ideas. If you see that a particular topic is hot, make note of it and look at more targeted sub-niches later on at more specialized sites (I’ll show you how later).

Lycos Top 50 – http://50.lycos.com

The Lycos Top 50 is another site, like Google Zeitgeist, where you can review the latest trends and look for hot topics to explore further. You can also look at Yahoo! Buzz for ideas as well.

Yahoo! Buzz – http://buzz.yahoo.com

eBay Pulse – http://pulse.ebay.com

The eBay Pulse site is a great place to start looking at sub-niches.

What you do is select the category first (using the topics you’ve gathered from looking at the previous sites), then look for profitable sub-niches by then selecting a sub-category.

Using this approach I discovered a crazy niche years ago that I’d never expect to do well online: hot water heaters. I’ve heard of people making fortunes selling pool tables – I’d never guess that because of my assumptions of the cost of shipping something like that.

The point is, although Ebay is a special marketplace, you will find ideas there for things selling really well online that you’d never have considered. Ebay is a place of “buyers” and a potential goldmine for research because of that. And don’t be put off by the fact that people are buying products there for cheaper than you can sell them as an affiliate – there are plenty of people in the world who either have no clue about Ebay or they’re concerned about doing business there.

Now that you have some potential sub-niches to work with, you want to see how much of a market there is. Just because a sub-niche is popular doesn’t mean people spend money on it.

Amazon – http://www.amazon.com

Amazon is also a great place to see what currently exists for any given sub-niche. Chances are, the more books written on a subject, the more that market spends on those topics.

NOTE: Another great Adwords trick is to run ads on the names of authors and their books that relate to your products. And if you really want to go a little further out there as an affiliate, know that authors are not marketers – I’ve met a lot of authors with huge followings that know nothing – NOTHING – about the kind of money they could make by doing little things like upselling, cross-selling and backending. They write a book, their name is “out there” and they might do some public speaking gigs or interviews, but that’s it. I’m telling you RIGHT NOW this is a huge opportunity.

Next I may use certain qualifying keywords to discover potential niches. You may have heard these called “discovery keywords”, and they are exactly that.

If you go to Google and type in any of the following keywords (make sure you surround them with double quotes for exact matches):

* How to
* How do I
* How do you
* How to fix
* How do I fix
* How do you fix
* How to prevent
* How do I prevent
* How do you prevent
* How to cure
* How do I cure
* How do you cure
* How to remove
* How do I remove
* How do you remove
* How to quit
* How do I quit
* How do you quit
* How to get rid of
* How do I get rid of
* How do you get rid of
* How to lose
* How do I lose
* How do you lose
* How to get
* How do I get
* How do you get
* How to stop
* How do I stop
* How do you stop
* learn
* get rid of
* fix
* remove
* prevent
* cure
* quit
* lose
* get
* eliminate
* restore
* stop

You can also use the Google Keywords Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal), just make sure you uncheck “Use Synonyms” because you only want exact matches.

Discovery keywords are a great way to find what people are looking to do, solve, or accomplish.

Finally, I like to capitalize on the “low hanging fruit.”

It’s much easier to sell a similar product to one that’s already selling well than to try to enter a market cold.

If you research your potential merchants up front, you’ll get a good idea how well they’re doing, both in terms of checking their traffic rankings by Alexa (http://www.alexa.com) and Compete.com (http://www.compete.com), as well as their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads in Google, Yahoo, and MSN (at a minimum). We’re going to cover that in the next section.

For now, let’s recap on some of the resources we’ve discussed, plus add a few more. Then I’ll show you how to research your niche, a very important part of the process.

After that, I’ll show you a quick way to check the potential profitability of a niche.
Brainstorming and Research Online Resources- Online

* Google Zeitgeist – http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
* Trend Watching – http://www.trendwatching.com
* Trend Hunter – http://www.trendhunter.com
* Online news websites – cnn.com, foxnews.com, cnbc.com, and local stations
* Lycos Top 50 – http://50.lycos.com
* Yahoo! Buzz – http://buzz.yahoo.com
* eBay Pulse – http://pulse.ebay.com
* Amazon – http://www.amazon.com
* Google Trends – http://www.google.com/trends
* Shopping.com Top Searches – http://www10.shopping.com/top_searches
* AOL Hot Searches – http://hotsearches.aol.com
* Google Groups – http://groups.google.com
* Craig’s List – http://www.craigslist.com
* Delicious Popular – http://del.icio.us/popular
* Dig – http://www.digg.com
* Google Catalogs – http://catalogs.google.com
* Magazines.com – http://www.magazines.com
* Amazon – http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/599858/
* Clickbank Marketplace – http://marketplace.clickbank.net

Researching Your Niche

This is an important stage, not to be skipped, because you want to find out if this niche will be profitable for you. Plus you are entering the beginning stages of product research as well.
Remember, in this stage, you especially want to know…

* Are other people passionate about your niche? If not, do they have a desperate problem they want to solve?
* Is the market big enough, but not so big you’ll have too much competition when you’re just starting out?
* Do the people in this niche spend money?
* What products are being successfully sold right now to this niche? Can you sell something similar? Can you add value and give them something they want that all other products of their kind are currently lacking?

Let’s run through the steps for this important strategy.

Step 1 – Keyword research. Build a spreadsheet with the most common searched-for terms for your niche. Start with some basic keywords (i.e. if you were in the tennis niche, you would start with the word “tennis” and branch out from there)

Here are some good keyword tools to help you generate your starting list:

* http://www.kwbrowse.com – Good keyword visualization tool
* http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com – Free version of keyword tool Wordtracker
* http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/ – SeoTools, powered by Wordtracker
* http://www.goodkeywords.com – Free Windows software for finding keywords
* http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/ – Search engine keyword tracker & keyword ranking tool
* http://www.nichebotclassic.com – Still a great resource, also powered by Wordtracker
* http://www.keyworddiscovery.com – Paid or free trial
* https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal – Google’s free tool
* http://imxfiles.com/webspy – Will show you the keywords people are using to advertise with Adwords.

There are MANY more keyword research tools out there. With the demise of Overture’s free service, many of them are still out there, but provide outdated or useless information. These are a good bunch to start with.

A couple more useful resources:

* http://www.terapeak.com – Researches eBay auctions over the last 30 days
* http://addictomatic.com – Research site that scrapes the web for keywords you specify

Step 2 – Discover the major players in this niche.

Perform Google searches for your main keywords and see who the advertisers are in the right-hand panel (i.e. Google Adwords advertisers).

Make a list of the top 10-20 products. If there aren’t 10 products, that’s fine too. If there’s only a product or two, however, rethink this one – too little competition is not a good sign.

Step 3 – Research the top discussion forums and communities for your niche.

Do a search on Google for forums in your niche. For example, if your niche is freestyle Frisbee, do a search for “freestyle Frisbee forum” or “freestyle Frisbee discussion board” or “Frisbee discussion”.

Forums are a GREAT way to find out what your market wants. Sign up as a member to these forums and start by “lurking”. That is, just spend some time reading all the posts.

When you feel more at ease with the group, introduce yourself and start asking questions. Tell them you’re considering buying one of the products in the market. Get their feedback. Ask them what they like and don’t like about it, etc. (Save this information for your review site up the road.)

Step 4 – What blogs do they read?

Check out the top blogs in your target market by doing a search on:

* http://www.technorati.com
* http://www.blogcatalog.com

Also check out the “blogrolls” at each of the blogs you visit and see who else they’re linking to. Make a list of the top 10 to 20 blogs or so here:

Step 5 – Check out YouTube.com and Google Video

(http://video.google.com) and do a search for your keywords. See what videos come up. Are they marketing-related? Do they include a website address on it to learn more, where they’re selling a product or service?

NOTE: Keep in mind that YouTube now runs paid ads similar to Google Adwords. When someone does a search for a topic there’s the organic results and the paid results to the right, just like on Google.

Keep in mind that you’re paying for views of your video – not quite like a normal Google ad. This means A) a click is probably worth about 20% what it is on Google search and B) that your video should be short and with a STRONG call to action. You’ll have to get people to go from YouTube to your site. I’ve only played with this a little bit and it’s been more of a learning experience than a big success – BUT – the traffic is there and so is the opportunity. It’s a virtually untapped source right now.
A Quick Way To Check The
Potential Profitability Of A Niche

I mentioned above that Amazon was a great place to do research.

Amazon – http://www.amazon.com

It’s also a great place to see what currently exists for any given sub-niche. Chances are, the more books written on that subject, the more that market spends on those topics.

Visit Amazon and specify “Books” to search.

Then enter your general niche phrase, ie, “tennis.”

If you get back thousands of search results, narrow your search – ie, subniche.

If you’re happy with the number of searches for this potential niche, next you want to see how (PPC) is going to cost me on Google Adwords. For that I can use a tool like SpyFu (http://www.spyfu.com), which gives you some good intel.

Let’s try “iphone”.

iphone

I want to make sure I won’t have to pay more than a dollar or two per click on average, but of course what you can profitably pay for PPC will depend on your product’s selling price and how many you can sell. Again, at this point I’m just trying to get a snapshot or pulse of this market.

Plus, the bid process also tells you a little about the moneymaking opportunities of a market. As a loose rule, if the cost/click hits anywhere between 50 cents and $3.00, it’s a good indicator that people are making money in this market. You can call this the “magic window.”

Over $3.00 and you better be prepared to swim with sharks.

Another great tool I pointed out is Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends).

There’s lots of useful information here. You can see that the news volume is synced with the search volume, and several notable news articles are displayed (not pictured but would appear on the right of the screen), along with where they occurred on the timeline.

In the lower section (not pictured but would appear at the bottom of the screen), you can see which countries, cities, and languages made the most searches. Be aware that the indicators are normalized, meaning they are adjusted for that region’s population. For example, South Africa has about 44 million people, compared with the U.S.’s 295 million. So the U.S. may have performed more actual searches, but after the adjustment is made, South Africa comes on top for this search term, which is “fly fishing.” In other words, the measurement is per capita.

In the upper-right corner of the page, you can switch regions (e.g. if you wanted to check the U.S. only), and you can change the time period.

For example, notice below how I changed the time period to a single month. See any cyclic trends there?

trends1

You will notice searches for this topic tend to spike every Friday, going into the weekend, and then fall again during the week. This information is extremely useful if you are going to advertise with Google Adwords. You can setup ad scheduler to run your ad groups set at a higher price during those peak traffic times, instead of spending your money throughout the week. Also, see PPC Scare tactics for additional ideas on this theme.

Another great use for Google Trends is if you are trying to decide between two different niches. If you enter your search terms and separate two or more with a comma, Google will compare them for you.

trends2

Very useful. The work is already done for you. You just need to put it to good use. As you can see above, piano is too broad a niche. It has a high amount of searches, but the bids for PPC traffic are too low (see KeywordSpy.com).

As a result, it’s not likely people are making a lot of money with that search term. Remember, high volume + low PPC bids = low click through rates and even lower conversions.

That doesn’t not mean the piano niche isn’t good – it means you need to dig deeper to find what people are paying for.

Fly fishing, on the other hand, does have PPC bids within the “magic window”, so money is likely being made there. However, the search term itself is too low indicating a small market – or a market that isn’t online.

Remember, these are guidelines – not rules.

You’ll also want to check the products for sale in your niche at www.clickbank.com (for digitally-delivered products) or www.cj.com (for physical products). A good site to see what the most popular products in Clickbank right now is http://cbtopsites.com/downloads/downloads

Here’s a GREAT site for gauging how big or small a niche is: http://lists.nextmark.com

It allows you to search through 60,000 mailing lists to see how many subscribe to lists with your main niche keywords.

Keyword Elite (www.keywordelite.com) is also a great tool for scoping the competition.

And let’s not forget Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts), a free service that lets you specify keywords, and whenever a new page pops up somewhere with those keywords, Google will notify you by email.

There are MANY resources out there that’ll help you with this kind of research. The key is to stick with the ones you find helpful and that are working for you. If you try to run your niche through every tool out there, you’re going to get some conflicting results, and it’s going to take you forever.

Keep it simple. Find a good niche, and move on.

Here’s another site to help you find good niches:

http://www.43things.com/zeitgeist/recently_popular_goals

These are things people want to do. They’re telling YOU.

One other tool that may help you:

http://www.mindmeister.com

A free online mind mapping tool, for those that like to organize everything using mindmaps.

Google Insights (http://www.google.com/insights/search/) is similar to Google Trends, but it gives some different information and flexibility. Still a very useful tool in determining market demand for your chosen keywords across time, major news stories that broke along the time line (like Google Trends) that could contribute to the niche’s popularity, etc.

And as I mentioned, I’ll always Google my keywords and check out the competition in the Adwords ads. In this case I pay special attention to the ads that sell information products (or services like mine if I’m selling a service).

I’ve covered a lot of ground here and I hope it’s not daunting. The hardest part about making money online, IMO, is finding the right products. From there, the rest is pretty easy.

This kind of work is necessary to get you OFF the beaten path. It’s the foundation you’ll build your empire on. And when you’ve found “the niche” and “the products”, the hardest work is done.

Now – all that said, there are probably 100 more ways to come up with products (I forgot to mention one of my favorites – Skymall, the free product magazine on most planes) and it could be easy to get swamped at this stage. I’m probably the last person who should tell anyone to get organized, but do it here. Be clear on your objective – get in, get out.

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