Introduction
One of the hardest things marketers have to do is pick a niche to market in.
This choice can make or break your efforts to make money online, and far too many marketers make the often fatal mistake of leaping into the weight loss or make money online niches.
Because these are high traffic niche with a lot of money to be made in them, many people feel they will leap into these niches because they should be easy to make money in. Right?
Wrong!!
These niches are the hardest niches for a new marketer to make money in.
The competition is fierce, the buyers are savvy and you can quickly find your resources and motivation drained as you lay on the verge of giving up.
Whilst there is money to be made in these niches, there are other niches that are much easier to make money in when you start out.
If you are determined to go into either of these niches, then do so when you are established and have learned the ropes.
You will be in a much better position to tackle them.
Many marketers tell you to start out in a niche that you are interested in,
i.e. something you are a fan of or are passionate about.
This can be a good idea because it is much easier for you to be motivated by something you have an interest in.
It allows you to focus on the Internet marketing and not have to learn about a niche as well.
However, there are some cases where a niche just isn’t profitable. There are some hobbies and interests which do not lend themselves to marketing.
Martial arts tend to be one where people will buy an occasional DVD or book, but that is about it.
Compare this to a baseball fan who will buy almost anything to do with his or her team!
It’s important that when you select a niche it is one where people make purchases or click on adverts online. Some niches people solely look for information.
For example, the niche of Dog Ear Infections might have a lot of traffic and little competition but people tend to be looking for information before they make a decision on whether or not to take their dog to the vet.
They are not looking to buy dog related products. This makes that niche very poor.
However, a niche such as Outdoor Heaters is a much better niche because people tend to be looking for information to help them decide to buy a product, which they will often buy online.
You need to consider whether the product or niche you want to promote is something that people buy online.
Something like shoes, expensive jewelry and watches don’t tend to be bought online.
Think about it, if you were buying a $10,000 Rolex watch, would you buy it from the Internet to save a few bucks or would you buy it from a reputable shop so you ensure you get a quality, genuine watch and good service.
All of these are things that you need to take into consideration when you are choosing your niche.
It is important for you that you find a niche that is not only profitable, but one where you can realistically make money with the level of competition in the niche.
Should the level of competition be too high, you will struggle to get your website ranking in the search engines.
If you have deep pockets and are planning to rely on paid advertising then this isn’t going to be a concern, but most of us will want some organic, free traffic too.
This report is all about how you can find profitable niches easily. Don’t worry, there are tens of thousands of them out there that you can work in and make money from.
What To Look For In A Niche
Firstly you need to understand what to look for in a potential niche.
You can do the niche research as we talk about it here or you can focus in on subjects you are passionate about and have some knowledge about already.
Your first task is to write down a list of all the things you are good at, all of your skills, and all the things that get your fires burning, no matter how silly, trivial or small they could be.
Pause reading this report just for a moment and write some down, and then come back to the report and you can look at how to evaluate the subjects (or niches) you have chosen.
Think about your hobbies, interests, sports teams you follow, job and other things that you know well.
Now you should have a few ideas of some niches that you want to tackle so you need to understand whether or not the niche is profitable and one that is worth pursuing.
Don’t be concerned if most of your ideas end up as no-go niches, there will be at least one gem in there that you can create a website it and start niche marketing.
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Do People Buy From This Niche Online?
Not everything sells online and you need to consider this when choosing what you are going to promote.
Some items, such as shoes, for example, really don’t sell well online because there is such a variation in styles and fits.
Very few people order their shoes from the Internet because they prefer to try them on first.
Expensive jewelry and watches are another thing that just don’t sell online.
If you are going to spend $10,000 on a watch then you are hardly going to order it from the Internet to save a couple of hundred bucks!
Examine the niche you are considering and see if people are buying it online. How many reviews are there on an Amazon product?
How many AdWords ads are there when you search for the keyword?
How many of the sites in the top ten are selling products compared to how many are just providing information?
This is going to give you an idea of whether or not people buy the product you are considering promoting online or not.
If they don’t buy it online then there is little point trying to sell it.
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How Many Other People Are Marketing In This Niche?
This is another important consideration when choosing a niche.
If there are a lot of other people promoting products in this niche then it is more than likely one that is profitable.
If there are just a few or no people promoting the product you have to wonder if it is one that doesn’t sell online or if you’ve discovered an untapped niche.
The latter is unlikely, but it is possible. Do your research to find out if the niche is one which is profitable.
This will also give you an idea of the competition in the niche.
A niche with too much competition may be too difficult for you to get traffic in, unless you are paying for the traffic that is.
You need the right balance of competition and traffic.
Your skills in SEO and your budget for paid traffic will determine how high a level of competition you can work with.
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Do People Search For This Niche On The Internet?
This is where you determine whether there is enough traffic to make it worthwhile marketing in the niche that you have chosen.
If there are not enough searches per month then you will get very little traffic, meaning your earnings will be low. You have to balance traffic versus earnings.
So a niche where you get paid $500 a sale may be profitable to go in with only 500 searches a month, but a niche which only pays $5 a sale won’t be worth as much to you.
It’s important that you determine how many people are actually looking for the product you are promoting in order to determine how profitable the niche will be for you.
Remember that the more profitable niches and high traffic niches are likely to have much more competition, meaning it could be harder for you to rank ell in the search engines and start to earn.
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What Problems Cause These People To Turn To The Internet
People come online to buy a product because they have a problem that they want a solution for.
Whether they have come online to buy a lawnmower, solve a health problem or buy a jersey for their favorite sports team, they have come online to solve a problem.
In the first instance, there problem is they want to cut their lawn. Now they may want to do it cheaply, neatly or in style with a ride on lawn mower.
You need to understand why they are at your website and market to them appropriately.
Understanding the problems your potential audience has helps you to focus your website content on their needs.
The more relevant your content is to your target market, the more likely they are to stay on your website and eventually buy.
This is one of the big secrets of marketers who make a full time income online.
Whilst it does entail some extra work on your part, it means more success from your website because it better meets the needs of your target market.
Why Evergreen Niches Are So Profitable
By far the best niches to market in are what are known as evergreen niches. The definition of an evergreen niche is one which is in constant demand, year after year.
So a niche like avian flu or the death of Michael Jackson are not evergreen niches because they are a flash in the pan. They come and go very quickly.
Sure, you can create a website in this sort of niche, profit from it whilst it is hot, but it doesn’t build you a long term business because after the interest in the subject has waned, the site stops profiting.
An evergreen niche is one where the interest in the niche is constant over the years and new people come into the niche regularly.
Evergreen niches include things like parenting, debt, betting, making money, weight loss and so on.
These are niches which are going to be profitable now and will still be profitable in a year and five years time.
People are in debt now. People were in debt ten years ago and people will be in debt in ten years time.
People want to make more money now. They wanted to make more money twenty years ago and they will still want to make more money in twenty years time.
Setting up websites in an evergreen niche means that you can profit from a single website now and in the future.
This means you can work once and get paid time and time again for that effort.
Any smart marketer will realize that this is a good thing and a great way to build a long term sustainable business.
Many marketers tend to have a combination of evergreen and other websites in their portfolio. This gives them a good range of earnings.
They have the long term earnings from the evergreen niche websites and then the short term boosts in income from the non-evergreen niches.
When you are considering entering a niche you need to determine if it is an evergreen niche or not. If it is evergreen then it is a lot more attractive to you as a marketer.
Remember that when you build a website in an evergreen niche you can build a long term, sustainable income.
Building these websites can provide you with a nice stable income to replace any day job income.
Make sure that your website portfolio contains a mixture of evergreen niches and other niches because this way you can profit from short term niches and build a long term business.
Some of the most popular evergreen niches include:
1.) ADHD
2.) Acne
3.) Adoption
4.) Alzheimers
5.) Anger Management
6.) Anti Aging
7.) Antiquing
8.) Anxiety
9.) Archaeology
10.) Arthritis
11.) Asthma
12.) Astronomy
13.) Back Pain
14.) Backpacking
15.) Bass Fishing
16.) Become A Nurse
17.) Bird Training/Train Your Bird to Talk
18.) Boating & Sailing
19.) Bowling
20.) Boxing
21.) Camping and Hiking
22.) Ceramics
23.) Cheerleading
24.) Chess
25.) Chicken Coops
26.) Chronic Fatigue
27.) Classic Cars
28.) Cooking/Recipes
29.) Copywriting
30.) Cure Hemorrhoids
31.) Decorating
32.) Depression
33.) Diabetes
34.) Divorce
35.) Dog Training
36.) Dropshipping
37.) Eating Disorders
38.) Gambling
39.) Gardening
40.) Get Your Ex Back
41.) Golf
42.) Golfing
43.) Greenhouses
44.) Hair Loss
45.) Headaches
46.) Heart Disease
47.) Hiking
48.) Honeymoons
49.) Horse Racing
50.) Horses Training
51.) How To Be Confident
52.) How To Budget
53.) How to Get Rid of Panic Attacks
54.) How to Learn French
55.) How to Learn German
56.) How to Learn Guitar
57.) How to Learn Italian
58.) How to Learn Spanish
59.) How to Play the Piano
60.) How to Play the Violin
61.) Hunting
62.) Hypnosis
63.) Hypoglycemia
64.) Insurance (home/auto/life/pet)
65.) Interior Design
66.) Invest In Gold
67.) Knitting
68.) Landscaping
69.) Lawn Care
70.) Learn The Guitar
71.)Learn To Dance
72.) Learn To Sing
73.) Life Coaching
74.) Low Fat Recipes
75.) Magic Tricks
76.) Marriage Advice
77.) Martial Arts
78.) Massage
79.) Memory Improvement
80.) Menopause
81.) Mental Health
82.) Model Trains
83.) Motherhood
84.) Motivation
85.) Mountain Biking
86.) Multiple Sclerosis
87.) NLP
88.) Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
89.) Organic Food
90.) Parenting
91.) Photography
92.) Poker
93.) Pottery
94.) Pregnancy
95.) Psychic
96.) Psychology
97.) Public Domain
98.) Quilting
99.) Racquetball
100.) Rafting
101.) Relationships/Dating
102.) Rugby
103.) Running
104.) Saltwater Fishing
105.) Scrapbooking
106.) Scuba Diving
107.) Self-Sustainability (solar power/wind-power/water filtration)
108.) Single Parenting
109.) Skateboarding
110.) Skiing
111.) Snorkeling
112.) Snowboarding
113.) Stop Smoking
114.) Stop Snoring
115.) Surfing
116.) Swimming
117.) Tattoo Removal
118.) Tennis
119.) Time Management
120.) UFOs
121.) Volleyball
122.) Wedding Planning
123.) Wedding Speeches
124.) Weight Loss
125.) Weight Training
126.) Wine Making
127.) Woodworking
128.) Wrestling
129.) Yoga
Finding Products To Promote
When it comes to finding products to promote there are a number of different places you can look.
You may want to look at Clickbank, Amazon, the CPA networks and so on.
Clickbank
The Clickbank marketplace is a good source of products. There are a lot of different products here that you can sell.
You can find the marketplace at http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm.
There are a lot of different products here in many different categories, many of which are evergreen.
You need to be able to determine which products here are good ones to promote and which ones are worth ignoring.
There are many products here which are good, and many here which are not so good.
You do not want to spend your time promoting a product that doesn’t sell because you aren’t going to make money from it.
This is an example of a product in the Clickbank marketplace.
You can see that it tells you how much you earn (on average) per sale and gives you a description of the product.
Some of these descriptions will have a link to a webpage with affiliate resource on, which could be useful if you use them.
Below this you can see how much you make on the initial sale ($18.97), and the percentage you earn per sale, which in this case is 75%.
Next you can see the average rebill total – which means this is a monthly membership (recurring income – which means you get paid every month from the initial sale).
Here it is $33.45 which means that people stay a member for 2 to 3 months on average.
The important figure if the Gravity (Grav) which here is 59.94. This is an indicator of how well the product is selling in the Clickbank Marketplace.
This figure can be manipulated, so don’t take it as gospel.
You can also look at the sales letter because this will give you an idea of the quality of the product and how well it will sell for you.
You can also check to see how the sales process works and whether your affiliate ID is captured or not.
Some sales pages end up as being squeeze pages and you may find your affiliate ID isn’t captured, so it is worth checking.
You can also do a search around on the Internet and find reviews of the product to see if it is any good or not. Remember that if you are
promoting a product that doesn’t sell well then you will struggle to make money from it. It is in your best interest to find a product that sells well and converts well.
Whatever your chosen niche, you will find some good products to promote here.
Amazon
Amazon is the world’s largest marketplace and you can find products here for almost every niche you can (and can’t) imagine.
These are physical products that are shipped to your customer’s doors.
The advantage to you of promoting something from Amazon is that they a global brand that is trusted and recognized by millions and millions of people across the world.
Amazon love people promoting their products and they try to make it as easy as possible for you to do so.
When you find a product you will see some information about it:
Here you can see the rating given to the product by the people who have bought it and how many likes there are.
These give you an idea of just how popular the product is. The more reviews and likes, the better selling the product is.
The star rating is also very important as it is an indicator of how good a product is.
Some products can sell well and have a low star rating whereas others can sell few and have a high star rating.
This shows you what people who bought the product thought of it.
Further down the page you will find more detailed information about the customer reviews.
When you are selecting a product from Amazon you want at least 4 stars in the review to make sure it is a top seller.
Sometimes it is worth promoting a product with fewer stars, but you do not want to move below 3.
Here you can see more information about the customer reviews and you can even read the reviews.
If there are a lot of lower quality reviews then you may want to skip promoting the product because many of these don’t sell.
People tend to look at the reviews on Amazon before they buy so they are a major influencer for your potential customers.
Amazon provides some further help for you in finding products to promote by providing a list of the best selling products on the site!
This is accessed at http://www.amazon.com/bestsellers. Here you can look through all the different categories and see what products are selling well.
These will give you a very good idea of popular products to promote.
You can also view other information about what is popular:
Again, these are useful in working out what is popular and what people want.
All of this is good information to help you to find quality products to promote from Amazon.
You also need to think about the amount of commission you will be paid. You start on 4% commission and it increases based on your sales to 6% and higher.
This means that on a $100 product you will initially earn $4.
In order to earn a good amount of money you want to focus on the more expensive products. This is a popular approach but a lot of people do this.
You can make some good money from focusing on lower priced products that have a high sales volume.
Sure you can sell one $100 product, but you could sell ten $10 products instead.
One thing to remember with Amazon is that the majority of the products you sell will be ones that you are not actually promoting!
People come to Amazon from one website and put many other products in to their carts.
You will find as many as 70-75% of the products you sell will be ones you aren’t directly promoting! This is good for you because it means more money in your pocket.
It is one of the big advantages of Amazon and why many people love working as an Amazon associate.
One thing … certain countries and states in the USA are not eligible to join the Amazon associate program.
If this is you then you need to look at
alternatives. A good one is Google’s Affiliate network or Commission Junction.
Both of these are good sources of physical products to promote from a wide variety of supplies and pays good commission.
Finding Profitable Keywords
When you have found a product to promote then you have to determine what keywords to target in order to make a profit.
This is very important because the keywords are what your target market type in to the search engines in order to find your website.
If a keyword has too high a level of competition then you are going to struggle to get ranking for it and get free organic search engine traffic.
If it doesn’t have enough searches per month then you will not get enough visitors to make your site profitable enough.
The Google external keyword tool (found here) is a great free tool to find good quality keywords.
There are many other tools on the market, but most of them pull their data from here. The difference is the user interface, the price and how they present the data.
To start with you need an idea of what keywords people type in to the search engines to find sites like yours.
Google are very helpful here, because if you go to Google.com and type in your main keyword, e.g. dog training you get some suggestions on what other people have been typing in:
This gives you a good idea of what people are looking for based on your keyword. You can then take these suggestions and feed them into the Google keyword tool.
If you type in a few of your main keywords here then you will get a much better idea of what terms people are typing in to the search engines for your niche.
Remember that you can use these keywords on your website and optimize pages around them.
Next you head over to the Google keyword tool. In the top right hand corner is a sign in link – you should sign in as you get up to 800 keyword
results, more data on each keyword plus the annoying captcha is removed.
All you do is type in your keyword (or keywords) in the box where it says Find keywords as shown below.
You can ignore the other to boxes here as for what we are doing they are not relevant.
Once you have done this, you click on the plus sign next to Advanced Options:
Here is where you refine the type of results you want to see.
You can pick a location to see how many searches there are in that country plus target specific languages too.
This is very useful if you want to target a specific country or are looking at monetizing your site by Amazon.com – you can see how many searches there are from within the United States which will help you determine if there are enough searches to make it profitable.
You can also include adult ideas if your niche falls in to that category.
Finally you can filter your results by some different criteria.
If you select Global Monthly Searches and then greater than (>=) 1000 that means you are looking for keywords which have at least 1000 searches a month,
i.e. decent traffic you can earn from. This helps you see better quality keywords that you can actually earn from because they have realistic traffic levels.
Though do bear in mind these are estimates from Google and may not reflect the amount of traffic you will actually receive.
On the left hand side is a section entitled Match Types:
Here you want to deselect Broad and select [Exact] to give you a more accurate reflection of searches.
With a Broad search if I as researching dog training it would mean any search that had those to words in, so the keyword “where is the best training course for a dog in Atlanta” would count as a search.
[Exact] means people typing in the word dog training so you have a better idea of how many people are looking for that specific keyword.
You can select more than one option here if you want and run a comparison between Broad and Exact to see the difference.
Remember though that Exact is a more accurate reflection of the amount of traffic you are going to get.
Once you have done this you can click search, wait a few moments and see the results!
One thing you can do that many people find useful is if you click the Download button at the top of the results you can download all of the results in a CSV file and use a spreadsheet on your computer to analyze them.
This is often easier because you can use the power of the spreadsheet to sort the data and manipulate it.
However, you can click on any of the column headings in the results to sort by that column.
In the first section you are presented with you see the results for the terms you typed in above.
They are repeated in the main results but they are separated out here so you can see how they compare.
Then below this you have the suggestions from Google – these are related terms that you may also want to consider targeting:
In the first column you have the keyword and the second tells you the competition amongst AdWords advertisers, NOT in the search engine results.
This shows you how many people are paying to advertise for that keyword.
Basically, if this is high you know lots of people are paying for adverts relating to that keyword and so therefore it must be profitable.
The Global Monthly Searches column shows you how many people are searching for the keyword across the entire world and the Local Monthly Searches shows you how many people are searching for it in the country that you selected earlier.
The last column that is important is the Approximate CPC which gives you an idea of how valuable the keyword is to advertisers, i.e. how much they are paying for each click on that keyword.
From here you need to select some keywords that you are interested in and are relevant to your site and determine how much competition there is for that keyword in the search engine rankings and whether you can rank for it.
This is done by going to Google.com and typing in intitle:”your keyword”.
This shows you how many people are directly competing for this keyword rather than how many people have any of the words in your keyword in their website.
You can see how many competing sites there are for this keyword below the search box.
As a general rule of thumb if it is below 5,000 then you are on to a winner. Between 5,000 and 10,000 is good to go.
Between 10,000 and around 25,000 means you are going to have to do some work to get the site ranking.
Between 25,000 and 50,000 means it’s going to take a lot more work to get ranking and over 50,000 means it needs a lot of effort to rank well in the search engines.
On top of this you need to look at the actual results in Google to see what the top 10 sites are. Are they user generated content like Youtube and Ezine articles?
Are they authority sites? Manufacturer sites? Sites built by Internet marketers?
This will give you an idea of how easy it is to get ranked. Just type the keyword in to Google to check.
If there are a lot of sites with user generated content then you will find it relatively easy to get in to the top ten.
If there are a lot of established authority sites then you may struggle.
You repeat this process for various keywords until you have ten to fifteen keywords that you are happy to rank for and get decent traffic.
Then you can start building your site and working on the SEO for it to get traffic to it so you can start earning.
Summary
Niche research is one of the most important parts of Internet marketing.
Far too many people skip over this step or pick a niche without researching it properly and then they struggle to get it ranking and making money.
If you take the time now to do your niche research then you will find it much easier to get your site ranking and earning.
Proper niche research will make the difference between earning and not earning from the Internet.
Spend the time up front to research your niches properly and you will find that the SEO becomes much easier.
When you have done your niche research you will not only know what keywords to target so that you can get ranking and earning easily, but you will also know what your niche wants.
Understanding what your niche wants means that they will find your site much more relevant.
This means they will stay longer and are more likely to click through on your adverts and buy. Relevancy is a very important part of Internet marketing.
Now you know how to research niches, check your current websites to see how they stack up and you may be surprised by what you find.
However, if you do this for all of your new sites then you will find that you can start earning much easier and quicker with what you know.
