Tweet

How To Find A Profitable Market Niche For Free

Written by: Martin Malden

Article Overview: Finding a profitable market niche and focusing on that is the surest way to build up a successful online business. Here are some ways to use the Internet to find and isolate a profitable market niche - without spending 1 red cent.

How To Find A Profitable Market Niche For Free

Shortly after I first started working online I became a member of Wealthy Affiliate. One of the main players in the forums there was Travis Sago (of BumMarketing) who had a simple rule people should follow if they wanted to succeed online:

1. Find a starving crowd
2. Find out what they want to eat
3. Feed it to them

I would add an extra step between 2 and 3:

2.a) Validate it

Easy to say, but what exactly does it mean..?

Before we get into breaking that down, let’s assume that you’ve already worked out what industry you’re going to be marketing to. Most likely it’s an industry that you’re either interested in or know a lot about.

Within that industry you then need to find a niche that you can dominate. Again – you may already have a clear idea of this just from your knowledge and past involvement.

But let’s say that, although you know your industry, you haven’t yet identified your niche. In this case here are some steps you can follow:

Find a starving crowd.

This refers to finding a market niche, and here are some ways to do that.

Join Forums:

There are thousands of forums online, covering pretty much any subject you can think of. Go to Google and do a search for forums relating to your area of interest – the industry you’re marketing to.

You’ll need to spend some time assessing forums that are worthwhile – while there are thousands of forums online, only a minority of them will be worth your time and effort. Find them!

They’ll be the ones with a large, active membership, where a reasonable proportion of the posts have a lot of replies, where rules relating to forum behaviour are politely but firmly enforced and where activity is current – meaning lots of activity in the past 24 hours and at least some activity in the past hour (but take the time of day and membership numbers into account!).

When you’ve identified and joined the right forum(s) take time to get to know the key forum members, and make valuable contributions wherever you can to establish a level of credibility and trust.

Find out what they want to eat:

As you come to know the forum you will begin to see a thread of frequently asked questions emerging. For example – I’m a member of the Warrior Forum and one of the questions that frequently comes up is about members’ views on the best free autoresponder service.

This was so obviously an area that people new to marketing online were interested in that it prompted me to write a recent post on it. If you had particular skills or knowledge in this area it could provide you with a market niche to consider.

Validate it:

Once you find a niche that looks interesting you need to validate it.

So back to the Big G and type in a search for your niche term (‘free autoresponder services’, for example). See how many results come back. This is the number of pages that contain your search term or parts of your search term – potentially your competition.

To get a more accurate result you should place your search term in quotes: “free autoresponder services”.

Next you should check out the number of searches per month that are made for your term or similar terms.

There are several applications available that will give you both these answers and give you ratios of searches to results, competitive information and so on.

But you can save yourself the money by checking out the search results in Google and Yahoo, and using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal (free) to get an indication of the number of searches per month.

Yahoo also had a publicly available keyword tool, called the Overture Keyword Selector Tool. This was better than the Adwords Keyword tool but it appears to have been taken offline for the moment.

I understand that Yahoo is upgrading it, so it would be worth checking for it periodically, because the old version had more functionality and enabled you to get more granular results than Adwords – it was more helpful as a result.

For example: Overture would bring you back a listing of search terms similar to the one you typed in, along with the number of times they’d been searched. You could then click on a particular search term and get a new list of more targeted search terms – so you could drill down to sub-niches.

In any event – what you’re looking for is a high number of searches and a low number of results. This would indicate that there’s a lot of interest in the niche (high number of searches) and it’s not particularly competitive (low number of results).

But beware: a low number of results could also indicate that the niche is not profitable!

So how to get an indication as to whether the niche is profitable?

Check the sponsored results on the right hand side of the search results pages.

You don’t want too few – that would imply that the niche is not profitable – and you don’t want too many – indicating too much competition.

I generally feel that if there’s between 1 – 3 pages (11 – 30 ads) of unique sponsored results this would indicate a niche that’s potentially profitable and not too competitive.

You then need to monitor these ads for a week to 10 days. If the majority of the ads are consistently being displaid over a reasonable period of time this, again, would indicate that the niche is profitable – because these ads would soon disappear if the niche was not profitable!

Feed it to them:

Once you’ve found out what your starving crowd wants to eat, and validated that it’s a potentially profitable niche, you need to feed it to them – which is the easiest step of all.

You can either develop your own product or identify an affiliate product that meets the needs you’ve identified, and then set up your marketing campaign.

How to set up a marketing campaign and start promoting your product to your starving crowd is the subject of another article – today we’re identifying your niche!

Check out eBay:

Another way to identify what people are searching for is to check out the most searched-for items on eBay.

eBay is the biggest online marketplace and people who make searches on eBay are people who are actively looking for something – they’re ready to buy.

A great starting point for finding out what people are searching for on eBay is here:
http://pulse.ebay.com/index/

This is an index page for eBay searches.

Once you identify something that’s being searched for regularly on eBay, and within the market industry you’re targeting, you can then go back and do the validation process I described earlier.

Off-line niche hunting:

As with so many aspects of running an online business – don’t limit yourself to online activities and resources. Go off line. And that applies to market research too.

There’s a great article here on how to use bookstores to identify profitable market niches. It’s a guest post by Jason on Copyblogger and very well worth a read. (Off topic, I know, but Copyblogger is the best source of copywriting tips I’ve come across – and I don’t get any commission for saying that, because it’s free).

So, to summarise:

Find a starving crowd: know what industry you’re targeting and join relevant forums, research eBay or research bookstores.

Find out what they want to eat: become active in the forums and look out for questions that are asked frequently, look for very targeted searches on eBay or magazines focused on a tiny niche within your market.

Validate your niche: check out the number of searches and results in a month, check out the sponsored ads and see whether there’s a regularly published off line magazine focused on your niche.

Feed it to them: Develop your product or find an affiliate product and develop your marketing campaign.

Related Articles
  Niche Marketing - 3 Simple Steps To Finding A Profitable Niche Market Online Within 5 Minutes Or Less
  Small Business StartUp Advice Why Picking the Right Market Niche is So Important
  Making Money On Internet - 5 Tips To Finding A Profitable Niche
  Finding a Niche Market
  Tips For Finding Perfect Internet-Based Niche Business Opportunities

Article Tags: crowd, extra step, forum members, google, key forum, market niche, marketing, membership numbers, proportion, sago, time of day, travis, wealthy affiliate



Related Forum Posts
How To Use Free Promotions For Your Internet Business? - In my opinion, the most challenging task about running a successful Internet business is how to effectively market your website with low cost strategies or using free promotions. Here are some guidelines on how to acquire free Internet business promotions for your website to drive more traffic and increase your revenue: 1. If you have started to promote your Internet business, keep it constant. If you promote your site with persistence, it will catch your audience’s attention. 2. Be patient. Try each method in promotion until you acquire the best, free promotion there is. You have to accept trial and error for your Internet business to reach the top. Free And Effective Promotions To Try There are many ways for your Internet business to be seen. Here are some free Internet business promotions you could try until you find the most effective. * Free promotions such as search engines and directories would give your web site the deserved traffic you always wanted. Make a point to check your Internet business ranking to know whether or not this type of free promotion is right for you. * Make a deal with other Internet business blogs on trading links which could help both web sites. * Think about what you’ve read so far. Does it reinforce what you already know about Internet business Promotion? Or was there something completely new? What about the remaining paragraphs? Make sure to use words that could easily interest the audience. * Find free classified ads that could boost the promotion of your Internet business. These ads could be seen by other people who you are not targeting for, but may as well be interested in your services. * Free and low - cost internet banners are spread all through out the World Wide Web. Banners that pop up at the top of a page or in a separate window would automatically catch your target audience’s attention. If your Internet business and its free promotion did not work even after accomplishing these methods, analyse your website. Track down all visitors, advertisements, and transactions. Then locate errors in your Internet business blog. Upload new files to your Internet business blog continuously for audience to return for new products and services. Monitor your own Internet business to see if it’s up in the market or down. Then be ready to try the methods again and surely it will work. It has always been said that the best things in life are free. Yes they are. And as soon as your free Internet business promotion proves to the audience its worth, then you’ll believe it’s true. Tyrone Shum Free Promoter
Re: How should i promote a new website? - ignore this message IF it's already been stated. I haven't had a chance to read all the replies and i have to jet from the office... I suggest marketing where ever your Target Market congregates. If it's a forum of concerned parents - go there. Strike up a deal with the forum owner (JV) and have him promote it to the list of members (Integration Marketing). If you want to go with Forums then i would partner with a parent who is a frequent poster/moderator on a particular Target Market Forum and have him/her add your link to their signature. That was just a thought but it's not as intense once you get buy in from the Forum owner or high ranked poster/moderator. Hope that sparks some new ideas.
Re: Ideas For Business - Hello Lucy, you may consider this list for Ideas for Business: (Top 23 list) Rank Company 1 Google 2 Genentech 3 Wegmans Food Markets 4 Container Store 5 Whole Foods Market 6 Network Appliance 7 S.C. Johnson & Son 8 Boston Consulting Grp. 9 Methodist Hospital Sys. 10 W.L. Gore & Associates 11 Cisco Systems 12 David Weekley Homes 13 Nugget Market 14 Qualcomm 15 American Century Invest. 16 Starbucks Coffee 17 Quicken Loans 18 Station Casinos 19 Alston & Bird 20 QuikTrip 21 Griffin Hospital 22 Valero Energy 23 Vision Service Plan
Re: Free elecrtricity generator - Can anybody help me with any aspect of my invention? In basic terms it is the energy of Gravity conserved and reused = (Auto engaging and disengaging shafts) = perpetual motion Perpetual motion + static friction generated in a pipe = free static electricity Free static electricity converted to usable electricity = Free usable electricity Free usable electricity generated by the constant friction generated by an auto engaging and disengaging machine that conserves the energy of gravity in a overcrankable clock spring The weight is easilly lifted back up the shaft with the aid of a double pully on ropes
Re: Do Women Play the Stock Market? - I also play Stock Market.....


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Think Time

Fear Factors in Small Business: Sales & Marketing

Ways to Improve Your Landing Page Conversions

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.