A Quick Guide To Finding A Niche Market

Posted on | January 10, 2009 |

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last couple of years you must be aware of just how powerful and profitable finding your own niche market or gap in the market can be, that elusive segment of a larger market which the smaller marketer can dominate and profit from, So how do you go about finding your own profitable niche market to start building your business around?.

Finding a niche market can be as easy or as hard as you want to make it, personally I always like the easy option, an ideal niche market should be one where there is an interest from a smaller but still a size able group of potential customers. Ideally your niche marketing business should built around an area left largely under-served by the big guns.

Finding your own niche market doesn’t have to be as difficult as many would have you think. There are many different ways of locating your own niche to dominate, but they can be learnt without spending money, You can find all the information you need for free.

The trick to coming up with a successful niche market is to look at the fringes of a larger market for unfulfilled needs. For example, what about a dating mini site offering a guide aimed solely at dating for single mums or what about a guide to buying a used car for woman,

Step 1.

A great place to start for new marketers is to consider your interest and expertise and hobbies, while this is not set in stone, it is well known that novices marketer’s can get ahead relatively quickly when tackling a subject they already have experience in.

Step 2.

So by now you should have at least 1 market (interest, hobby, job etc.) written down, for ease we’ll call these your main markets. The next step I use, is to open up ‘Google keywords tool’, its free, just Google it. Now enter your main markets into the Google keywords tool one at a time check the ‘use synonyms’ box and click ‘get keywords ideas’, now take a keyword which has less relevance to your original keyword, but still makes sense. For example, if your main market was plumbing, you might have ‘learn bathroom plumbing’.

Do you see how this works, within just minutes you can have the seed’s of you first possible niche market which might be a great place to start or if not just carry out the same procedure until you find something that works. Once you have a keyword that looks promising try repeating the process even further which can help to reduce the market further until you find a market small enough to serve and obviously big enough for you to profit from.

Step 3

Now we’ll move onto researching the competition in your chosen niche market and why some competition can actually be a very good thing, so don’t fall into the usual trap which many so called gurus teach, marketing to a competition free market is more often than not a waste of time,

Remember if the market is so small and with no competition the chances are area will not be viable or indeed profitable, that’s not to say that it won’t become so in the future, but for now let’s stick to the quickest way to profit through niche marketing.

For the next bit of research I use a piece of free software called’WordTracker’s Free Keyword tool’. Your probably already aware of this software so I won’t go on about it, all you really need to do here is enter your keyword or phrase (e.g. Installing a bathroom), wordtracker will give you a list of the most searched for keywords, now copy & paste the list onto your notepad. Wordtracker by pulling data from a number of the smaller search engines, which tend to be relative to Google. As a rule, you should be looking for keywords with a count of over 30.

At this point you should have a list of good keywords related to your chosen niche market. Now you need to do some research on you competition to establish how profitable they are (how profitable this niche is, or could be), For this step I use another free software, the company which market this software offer a paid and a free version, the free version will do everything you need at this stage. It’s called ‘Traffic Travis’, (google it), enter your keyword list into the Traffic Travis software to establish how many people are bidding on keywords from your list, in the PPC market. I’m not suggesting that you dive into PPC advertising, this research is only done to determine whether people are willing to pay money constantly to have their ad appear for those keywords. The premise is that if they are, then the keywords themselves must be profitable!.

Well that’s basically it, looking for your own niche market can be as complicated or as easy as you want it to be, so why make things difficult. I recommend you check traffic-travis over the following week to see if the same websites are consistently bidding for the same keywords. And if they are you’ll know this is a profitable niche market to get into.

I hope this article helps some of you cut through some of the junk.

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