Chapter 2 – Choosing Your Niche
As you begin your journey into starting your own niche marketing business, you want to start by jotting down your ideas for a niche that you would like to work in and the reasons behind your interest.
There are many reasons for working in a niche. Many people decide on their niche because it's a hot and trending market. While it's okay if you want to jump on the bandwagon of new and emerging markets, you have to be prepared to be nimble and put in the hard work to stay ahead of the curve.
However, some trends can be quick moving, while others aren't that interesting or exciting, or sustainable. Significant events like the Olympics or the presidential election can generate a ton of buzz and demand for memorabilia, but it will quickly drop off as soon as the event is over.
These kinds of niche markets will only allow you to be in business for a short period before you have to find another niche that will be profitable.
Niches that don’t expire too soon, or at all, are referred to as ‘evergreen.’ An evergreen niche may not have as much excitement as the latest gadget, but they are more stable and can keep your business running for years.
Being evergreen means that the products and services that you are selling should be able to keep you earning a profit year after year. You also should try to find a niche that is interesting enough to make it fun and enjoyable for you to go to work every day.
For many, choosing a niche is easy because they base their business on their own personal interests and expertise. Be an expert in what people are looking for in that niche can be a good thing.
It will give you a pretty good idea as to whether or not the niche will be profitable, to begin with. In other words, if you buy products in the niche, chances are there are other people out there that will buy them as well.
However, it is essential for you to keep in mind that people won't always behave in the manner that you expect. While you may think that your idea is a terrific one, without doing the proper niche research, it could bomb, leaving you with the realization that there is no paying market for it after all.
A common mistake that you’ll want to try to avoid is spending your time creating a product, website, and more, for a niche that is worth little or nothing because it is not a paying market, or because you're targeting the wrong audience.
You need to listen to what people are saying, and figure out what problems and challenges they have, then offer a solution to those challenges. By conducting research and getting to know your prospective customers better, you can find out what actions they are willing to take to achieve their goals.
Doing in-depth analysis before you start working on your product will save you months of hard work for zero profit.
Marketing as an affiliate is the easiest way to make money when you first start your business. Becoming an affiliate of top companies like Amazon gives you access to millions of products that you already know are in demand.
Depending on the reward system you choose and the products you are selling in specific niches, you can start earning commissions as high as 15 percent.
Many of the top companies like Amazon and eBay have their own affiliate programs that are administered in-house. Other companies run their affiliate programs through a marketplace that operates the program for them.
While the most lucrative way to make a profit in your niche is to create your own products and services to sell, there are several reasons why you may want to consider starting out with affiliate marketing.
First and foremost, affiliate marketing is a way to become profitable soon after starting your business. Affiliate marketing also takes less time and energy to get started. The products that you can sell through an affiliate program are a good indicator that the niche is a paying one.
Affiliate marketplaces can also be a valuable place to conduct your research. They allow you to see exactly what people are buying and how much they are willing to pay for the products.
This will give you a good idea of how your own products and services will fit into the paying marketplace. Staring out with affiliate marketing can help you to avoid some of the common mistakes in niche marketing, like setting a price point that is too high or too low or creating products that no one wants.
By doing this research, you’ll also be able to see the gaps in your offerings. Therefore, when you are ready to develop your own product or service, your final decision will be based on the research you've conducted because you will have discovered a real need on the part of your prospective clients.
Another reason you may want to consider affiliate marketing is that you can learn a great deal about marketing.
The affiliate marketing programs are usually run by a manager who is an expert in coming up with exciting offers, ideas, and graphics for their offers. Often, they will provide the affiliate marketers with useful tips and hints that can help them sell their products.
To gain a better understanding of how to market your own products, read the emails they send you and take action as suggested. Carefully look at the creative items that they come up with.
Read the sales letters to see how they are constructed. Taking these actions can help to provide you with a crash course in marketing, even if you've never sold anything before.
You can also get suggestions, useful tools, and free material to include in your newsletter, Facebook pages, and more. With the more popular products, and during particular times of the year, they will also send you exclusive flash sales or seasonal offers.
Copy and paste these codes and put them in your emails, on your website or blog, as the signature file in your comments on a discussion forum. Doing this can lead to you soon outselling even experiences affiliates because you are taking the time to keep up with the latest trends and what’s hot.
Finally, the more streams of income you have in your business, the more they can create a profit. Your commission checks may not be much to start with each month but increasing your income will be up to you and how many products you can promote.
Getting Started with Niche Research
An important step is discovering your niche market is to identify the keywords that are used by your target market. You need to determine what keywords they are typing in and use them to search the topics and products that are related to your market.
The searches that you uncover will help you know the pain points of the niche customers and what problems they need to solve.
This will help you earn enough profit by grabbing the maximum number of specifically targeted customers that are looking for products and services that are directly related to your niche.
You can use Google AdWords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/#?modal_active=none) to search out specific words and phrases that are related to your niche market.
The tool is free to use and provides you with the opportunity to find all the relevant keywords that are being used by your target customer. You can use the data you gather from this tool to research the specific products, services, and solutions in a niche market and figure out which ones apply to your particular area of expertise.
Once you’ve identified some of the keywords and phrases that are associated with your niche, you can begin to identify those keywords that have the most profit potential.
You can measure profit potential in three ways:
Most people try to make an educated guess on those three points, but in the following section, you'll learn how to use the real-world information to eliminate the guesswork.
Using Google Keyword Planner, you can estimate the amount of potential visitor traffic, which keywords people are using, and any associated keywords that give you clues as to customers’ other requirements.
Your research needs to be focused and in-depth. You need to test as many keywords as is practical until you think that you've covered every keyword or key phrase that a potential customer would use to search for your product or service.
The first piece of data that you will need to look at is if there is a sufficient monthly volume of potential customers actively searching for the product or service you are looking to sell online.
You’ll also want to determine if other businesses are already making money from similar products or services. You can do this with Google AdWords Keyword Planner along with search engines like Google, Bing, and Ask.
Next, you'll want to organize your keywords and key phrases into groups. You can do this by breaking all your keywords down into groups of specific keywords and phrases.
For example, the keyword phrase, “digital camera,” can be separated into “underwater digital camera," "underwater digital cameras," and "digital underwater camera." These would be placed in one group while, "digital camera case," can be separated into "underwater digital camera case," and "digital camera cases," and can be placed in another group.
You want to divide separate keywords into groups of no less than 2,000 searches per month. The purpose of doing this is to find a prevailing mindset of groups of people that are looking for similar products, services, information, benefits or features.
To drill down further and discover more potential buyers, you can select the top ten keywords. From these ten keywords, the goal is to try and find a total of 100,000 or more searches in total per month. Every one of these can be added to the Google Keyword Planner Tool to uncover even more specific long tail keywords.
Now you want to start looking for "Money Making Words" within your list. These buyer keywords signal that people will pay for information. These keywords include, model numbers, brand names, color, buy, cheap, for sale, seller, supplier, etc. The more specific the search, the more likely the customers are to buy.
Next, you can put them in an Excel spreadsheet to find the total number of searches for the top ten keywords. If the number is less than 10,000, it isn't a good market to enter.
Keywords that have a monthly search total of more than 10,000 searches show an okay market, those with 30,000 searches mean it's a good market, and over 100,000 searches per month are the best possible scenario you can have.
The most reliable and inexpensive ways that you can check the potential profit of your keywords is to test them live online. You can upload some keyword specific content to a page on your current blog or website, Facebook fan page, YouTube channel, Pinterest, etc. You can test each piece of new material and see where it lands on Google and how much traffic it brings.
This strategy will allow you to find keywords that have started bringing you traffic organically, that are converting the traffic to revenue, and those that can rank higher. The more traffic the keyword has when ranking lower, the more profit potential it has.
Remember, if you choose to enter into a popular market, you don’t have to start out competing for top keywords. You can compete for less competitive, long-tail keywords instead.
Choosing a micro-niche can become your backdoor entry into the larger niche market.
Once you've decided on the niche market that you want to enter and you've chosen a few keywords, and key phrases, the next step in the process is finding your ideal customer.