Picking A Niche Market

(View the first article in this series here)

By niche market we mean a specialised market. For instance Health is a huge broad market but Dandruff Treatment is a small niche market within Skin Care within Health. If you go on Ebay looking for something by category you will usually start with a broad market category name and tap down through sub-categories until you reach the area for the product you are looking for. That is a niche market.

When you put a large category search term such as ‘Health’ into a search engine it will come up with a huge number of results, basically the market is swamped with websites and products and it is very difficult to get a website or blog post ranked for that term as so many large companies are paying SEO experts to target the search term for them. So the answer for small marketers is to find a small niche and a longer search term that still has traffic to it but is easier to rank for in the search engines.

So first up is to find a niche market to work in. This series is aimed at showing how to build a blogging business based on reviews for physical products and earning commissions from the vendors of those products. However, the problems of finding the right niche are the same regardless what your site is based on.

You need:

1. A niche market you are interested in
2. A niche you know has products which you can target
3. A niche with traffic
4. Not too many people working in that niche market, a balance between enough to show it is worth targeting and too many for you to get your website ranking in the top ten.

An initial approach would be to consider any niche market you may have an active interest in as later when you’re trying to increase the position of your blog in the search engines it will help if you are interested in the subject matter as article marketing will be an important part of obtaining links to your website.

However if you are only partially interested or even not at all there will still be the option of getting articles written for you and it is not as expensive as you may think. You can pay as little as $5 for a good well written article and there are ways of using that article to get multiple backlinks without submitting identical articles.

At this stage you should be thinking generally about the niche you may want to work in. Before you finalise your choice you will need to look at what products are available to promote as you will not want to just rely on adsense for monetisation, so the next article in the series will cover finding affiliate products.

Some research to see what markets are getting traffic is useful at this stage though. This is covered more thoroughly in keyword research but it is worth having a look now to help get a feel of what areas may be of interest.

EBAY tools

Have a look through the ebay product categories, you don’t necessarily have to use an ebay product to promote, additionally if you have an ebay seller account you can use something called ebay pulse (http://pulse.ebay.com/) to check the top selling items and much more. It may just give you some ideas. It is almost worth getting a seller account just for information like this. You can pick any main category heading and it will give you a top ten of item sales within that category plus the largest stores by active category listings, and while the latter may not seem so useful, just knowing what ebay stores are carrying is an indication of what may be selling. The sub categories have the largest stores list but not usually the top ten items. You can see the an example of the main menu and clicking on a main category heading below:

There is also Ebay marketplace research (http://pages.ebay.com/marketplace_research/index.html) but it is a paid service at $9 per month ($14 for 45 days) though if you wanted you could just pay for 45 days worth while researching but unless you have decided to concentrate on ebay products there may be better ways of research.

Incidentally at different points in my article series I will link to other good blog posts or products that will help. For anyone interested in ebay you can get a lot of excellent help by visiting blogs such as Barry Wells (http://barry-wells.com/ who has written some great posts on ebay and has some excellent free reports as well on his other site (http://www.e-books2u.co.uk/ebayinfostore/).

AMAZON tools

Amazon has a bestseller list area:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/

where you can see best selling items in different categories. Again it may give you some help in deciding your niche.

GOOGLE tools

Google has a keyword research tool that you can use initially to help you see what niches are getting the traffic. Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

and click on a category on the left and you’ll see something like this:

We’ll look at all these tools again and more in the keyword research article but for now they will help to get an idea of the niche you want to target.

What you should remember is that you will not be aiming at a market that has huge traffic but of course within a very popular market there will exist smaller niche opportunities for you to aim at so these lists of top selling and high traffic items can still help to guide you to an idea for your niche.

Just do plenty of research before you go headlong into creating a blog as an important part of the blog will be the domain name and while they do not cost a lot you do not want to have to start changing your domain name after you have started. So, niche research, affiliate product research, keyword research before you even think about getting a domain name.

One final note is that if I was looking for a niche I would use a tool called Market Samurai to help me.Just a small part of this is the keyword analysis which enables you to check what competition there is for any keyword, how many searches there are, top ten websites, number of backlinks to these sites, PR, etc etc. As it is colour coded I can tell almost immediately now how good a chance there is of me ranking in the top ten for a keyword phrase and I have used it before I enter a niche to see if there are any useful keyword phrases in that niche I could rank for. Invaluable. I will be looking at this more in the keyword research article but it is the best tool I have ever used and is so vital to me that I actually had to look for free tools to use in these articles as I use Market Samurai for so much. However if anyone does not have this tool and is thinking of trying it, be aware that there is a 12 day free trial period where it is fully functional so if you really want to make the most from it before you commit to it you should try to do as much research in those 12 days when it is fully working. It is fantastic value even if you buy it but not everyone will want to buy it straight away. It does however still function as a keyword tool after the trial period.

Ok, enough for now, the next article looks at where you can find affiliate products to sell (physical ones that is as that is a huge area of search where people look for products they want to buy.

I hope there will be many other useful resources mentioned by visitors so make sure you have a look at the comments as you may find even better advice and tools to aid in niche market research.

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