How to find a niche market.

After reading the above article and coming to grasp the idea of what a niche is, you may have went on to ask "Well how can I find a niche for my own purposes?"

If you have had any true interest in business you've probably heard of the term "supply and demand". This is what I want you to think about now, but first I want to in essence butcher this term and rearrange it to fit with what we are looking for on the internet, a niche market we can take advantage of.

When you think of supply and demand your mind probably brings up a picture of a certain hot product on a store shelf. Everybody wants this product and theres simply not enough of it to go around, thus the stores who can keep this product on their shelves obviously will get the most customers.

When dealing with the internet, this "hot product" mentioned above is a little bit different, it's not an actual item you will sell, it is instead information.

Think about it, if you have ever bought something online then most likely you did some research on the product before you decided to purchase. Perhaps you read reviews from a dozen sites or more until you came to the point of collecting enough information to make a decision on whether to buy the product - or not.

Perhaps in the past you have thought to yourself, "I'd really like to find a niche to make money off of but I can't seem to think of one." or "All the niche ideas I think of are already taken!"

I want to draw your attention for a moment to a word that I have really come to love, focus. If you are truly serious about something and it continues to occupy your thoughts then something incredible happens, something most of the world takes for granted, you start to evoke the problem solving skills in your brain.

Most of the time this process takes place without our deliberate wanting or willing it to happen, instead it runs in the background of our minds because we have focused intently on it.

It is at this point, when our mind is running it's problem solving skills in the background that we begin to see things that we might have never thought of, and as you go through with your day to day lives certain things which didn't snag your attention before will stand out to you.

For me this has been the very best method for finding niche markets. Doing this and then researching information on the niches you come up with will lead to cash in your pocket.

The internet is a vast space. Most likely, whatever you think of will have been done before, indeed most likely, it will have been done many thousands of times before.

Many people will think of a niche they would like to do and do a search on the niche to see how many competitors there are for that niche. Often times they will see something like: "Showing results 1-10 of about 345,000 pages." and it's intimidating, so they just give up on a niche that could have been possible for them to profit from.

How to power your way into a niche.

Sometimes even though there are many thousands of pages on a particular niche it is still waiting and ready to be busted wide open by a well thought out and put together web page.

Check the top 15 or so pages in the search results.

• Do they have customer reviews?


• Do they have custom written articles?


• Do they have pictures or videos?


• Have they done their homework?

Remember "supply and demand" the customers want information. Think like the customer would, and go out and find the information that would make *you* comfortable in buying a product.

One of the things that is often overlooked is questions that a customer might have. It could be that you can go above and beyond the other websites by answering those questions that they have failed to ask. Consider calling the manufacturer of a product and asking them questions about the product. --This is what I mean by have the competitors done their homework.

When battling for the right to be number one, find chinks in the opponents armor and build your own armor stronger with that knowledge.

Keywords are a very important aspect of any page. Keywords help tell search engines what your page is about and help searchers find your page. Here on Squidoo, they call these keywords "tags".

Most people use some program or other to help them find good keywords for the page they're working on. If you don't have one I recommend using Keyword Discovery this is a free tool and it does a great job, for the price.

Now for an example of "power keywords", when you do a search on a niche using the keyword tool above you'll see a bunch of different keywords, and how many times those keywords were searched for.

Naturally you would think that the most searched keywords would be the best for your page, ultimately driving more visitors to your site. Now, this may be the case, but the highest searched keywords are often the most competitive as well.

In the big picture you have to see that people who are interested in the product you're trying to sell are on a quest of sorts to find the information they need in order to confidently make a purchase online. However, not all people are on the same stage of this "quest" -this is where power keywords come into play.

Take this as an example:

Name of product - This is the main keyword, it receives the most searches.

Questions or long search terms about the product - Questions people have type into search engines, this type of keyword has a bit less searches.

example searches:

Does Miracle Monkeys Amazing Foot Cream really work?

"Where to buy Miracle Monkey foot cream" -Power Keyword

"Order Miracle Monkey foot cream online" -Power Keyword

"Miracle Monkey foot cream with free shipping" -Power Keyword

In the example above the power keywords as I call them may only have a few searches a month, however they are called power keywords because they target a customer who has reached the end of his information quest and has made a decision to buy the product.

When you think of niche marketing you generally think of a low competition and relatively unknown thing. However on the internet, that doesn't have to be the case.

Take for example this lens I made on a popular digital camcorder, The Flip Mino.

Obviously digital camcorders is a highly competitive area to get into on the web, there are many high quality blogs and review sites that cover this area. Could I by myself hope to compete with web giants such as Engadget? I couldn't, I wouldn't stand a chance just jumping right in there, but I did succeed in this example at making a profit.

Here's why, I was browsing tech news and found out about this Flip Mino camcorder that was soon to be released. It all comes back to supply and demand again, or information. At that time there was little information about the product, which created a temporary niche opportunity.

I ended up making about $50 in commission for around an hour of work.