Chapter 4
Testing Your Topic for Marketability
Now that you have found a few topics that you would love to build a business around; it is time to check them for marketability. Remember, just because you are passionate about a topic doesn’t mean you can build a part time, risk-free, internet business; that can grow to replace your full time income without quitting your job.
Potential Audience Size.
In order to build and sustain a sizeable income, there has to be a large enough on– line audience to support your efforts. Following are several reliable tests that will help you determine this.
Audience Size Test #1
It’s amazing what you can learn by searching on Google. Especially if you know what you are looking for and how to search.
Open up Google and type in the name of your topic but make sure you put it in parenthesis. Like this – “Men’s Fitness”. And then hit ‘enter’.
If you don’t include the parenthesis it will pull up everything related to the words fitness and/or men’s. But with the parenthesis it will only bring up sites with that exact phrase.
For example: Men’s fitness brings up 101,000,000 hits. Whereas “Men’s fitness” brings up 1,720,000 hits. The true number of sites that mention “men’s fitness” specifically.
What you are looking for are topics that bring up between 500,000 and 5,000,000 hits.
Larger than 5 million and your topic is too broad and it will be difficult to target your audience and get attention. Less than 500,000 and it may be too small to sustain a sizable income. Here are some examples:
“Fitness” – 505,000,000 hits. (Too big) You have to pick a subtopic like:
“Men’s Fitness” – 1,720,000 hits. That’s a nice size market to get into. Even if you picked another subtopic (or niche) of the fitness industry like:
“Sport’s training” – 2,190,000 hits. That’s also a great market.
Every large market will have dozens of niche markets that are the perfect size to target with your efforts.
If it’s a small market, you can still generate income, but it may be extremely difficult to generate the kind of income that can replace your fulltime job.
A possible exception to that rule:
Let’s say that you are very passionate about a topic but your search shows that there are less than 500,000 mentions on the web. You can possibly make a sizable income in that niche if: You are already an established expert or authority in that field and/or you have a new or much improved product or service to offer.
Exercise #1
Write out the names of your topic or topics and then do a Google search and record the number of ‘hits’ for each one.
Audience Size Test #2
Next, you want to do a search and see if you can find at least 1000 blogs related to your topic. If you have a broad topic you know you will find many more then 1000. However, if you have smaller niche, this is a good test.
Exercise #2
Once again open up Google and type in “name of topic”/blog (be sure and use the parenthesis) and then hit ‘enter’. If more than 1000 blogs show up your topic has passed that test.
Audience Size Test #3
Facebook followers.
Once again, if you are not sure if your niche is marketable you can look to see if there are Facebook sites that are about your topic that have at least 2,000 followers. If you find at least one site, that will be sufficient because that means there will be a lot more sites with smaller numbers but collectively it is a good indication of a sizable market.
To do the search, go to Facebook’s home page and at the top in the search bar type in your topic. As you type you will see a drop down box that lists some of the sites in your topic. You can just view them and see if there are any that meet the requirements.
For example, when I typed in ‘cat care’ (you don’t need the parenthesis) it brought up a list. The first two had followers of 4,000 and 11,000. A nice size market.
Here is a great tip:
If you are in a relatively large market (2 or 3 million ‘hits’ on Google) see if you can narrow it down by choosing to start in a sub-category or smaller niche, but still be over the 500,000 ‘hits’ mark. (Of course, it still has to be something you are interested in).
It will be easier to get the attention of your market and still allow you to expand your offerings at a later time.