How to Find a Profitable Niche Market

One of the first things to consider when creating a profitable online business is knowing who your niche market is.

If you find yourself constantly searching for products to promote online without much success, perhaps one of the things that you could try is to find out more about serving the right niche market, instead of focusing on promoting products from a broad target market.

What is a niche market?

A niche market is a specific segment of a market or a well-defined group of potential customers. For example, Dollar Shave Club is a business that targets a niche of customers who enjoy the experience of having a good shave with high-quality razors every month.

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Why choose a niche market?

1. You have the opportunity to showcase your authority in your niche

Nowadays, success in capturing your niche market is not about being a jack-of-all-trades but by establishing yourself as an authority on a specific niche.

Search engines like Google loves authority websites and constantly pushes Google+, its very own social networking site, as platform to promote for high quality, human-created content in search results pages. They want to prioritize contents from expert authors by giving them more traffic and visibility.

2. It’s easier to promote products or services on your website

Targeting a niche market and taking the time to understand their needs will mean that you won’t have to waste time searching for product ideas because you already know which products that your audience needs.

Untapped niche markets have lesser competition, therefore your chances of success in those niches are higher than in a saturated market.

As far as SEO is concerned, it is also a lot easier to optimize your online marketing strategies using long tail keywords to boost search-driven traffic and conversion. Yes, they may have lower search volume but they are a lot easier to rank faster and higher than those frequently-searched keywords.

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3. It costs less to target a niche market

When marketing your products or services, targeting the entire market segment is a very difficult thing to do. A broad target market will cost you more to market and is less effective in discovering what the audience really wants, compared to streamlining your marketing efforts to a specific niche.

Where to find your niche?

The usual question asked by first time online marketers is, “What profitable niche should I get into?” Hmmm.

It’s a tough question and there’s no single one answer for that. But don’t worry. Here are some helpful ways to research for a profitable niche:

1. List down the things you have some expertise or experience in.

As an example, if you used to work as an organic ice cream production worker, then you have something to share about making organic ice cream.

If one of your favorite hobbies is growing and cultivating bonsai trees, you may want to have your niche based on bonsai cultivation.

It’s a lot easier to create content about something that you’re most passionate about or have some sort of experience or knowledge in that would appeal to your niche audience. After all, these are the people who are interested in the same things.

2. Identify your niche market keywords.

Here comes the fun part: Identify the niche keywords used by your audience with the help of a powerful free tool, Google AdWords Keyword Planner.

These keywords are not just your gateway to the topics that your audience cares about, it will also tell you whether there is income potential in that niche. You may want to pay close attention to keywords with more than 1,000 global monthly search volume.

However, you should note that there may be niche keywords with less monthly search volumes but higher profit potential and less competition. In this case, you will definitely want to optimize for these keywords as it would be easier to rank keywords with low competition.

3. Evaluate whether your keywords are competitive or not.

So you’re done discovering the niche keywords that are relevant and applicable to your business. Now it’s time to check whether it is competitive or not.

You can simply go to Google, and type in your niche market keywords. Check what are the pages listed in the first page of the results, and also if there are Pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements. These can give you a pretty good idea to determine if there are many other brands competing for these keywords.

4. Decide if you want to pursue that niche market

After you have evaluated the competitiveness of your niche keywords, decide if that niche market is something that you want to pursue in the long term.

Just remember, the more targeted PPC ads you’ll see on the results page, the harder it is for you to compete with these brands especially when you’re just starting out with online marketing.

If you want to firmly establish your web presence on that niche, it’s best to work around keywords that have low organic competition and keywords that have minimal paid advertisements.

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Domain Name and Web Hosting

Finding your niche is only the beginning. You would need to set up your very own niche website.

Make sure to have your domain name registered and website hosted on a highly reliable and enterprise-grade web hosting partner like Vodien. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with server administration because everything is taken care of for you.

Once your website is up and running, it’s now time to focus your efforts on providing good content, building quality links, and growing your email list which would be another topic that we will discuss soon.

So what do you think about niche marketing? Do you have another way in discovering your niche that works for you? Let us know by sharing your comments below.