Finding a niche: Here’s an exercise that you can do right now to identify your personal interests and how to narrow down a niche to help you make money online.
First, ask yourself the following questions and write your answers on a piece of paper. Don’t discount anything at first. Finding a niche isn’t a quick exercise. This isn’t the stage where you should be trying to identify whether a market exists or whether it’s profitable and you can make money online. This is just the beginning of a brainstorming process and I’ll show you how to channel these ideas in a minute.
These first set of questions relate to things that are positive in your life:
- What are some things am I personally knowledgeable about?
- What are some things I enjoy talking to people about?
- What are my hobbies?
- What jobs have I had?
- What things do I do on a daily basis?
- What am I interested in?
- What makes me happy?
This next set of questions for finding a niche relate more to things you are negative about – sometimes these things can be equally powerful motivators for your passion:
- What do I wish I knew more about?
- What would I like to change about myself/my friends/the world?
- What experiences have I had that I would like to protect others from having to go through?
- What makes me sad?
Now these are just examples. The words you use or the questions you ask could be different from these, but whatever you can use to provoke deep personal responses, the better you are going to be able to come up with something that you can really be passionate about – something that you will get out of bed to pursue every morning. Finding a niche you are passionate about is a fantastic experience and will help you make a lot of money online.
Now from the answers to these questions choose the three things that you felt the strongest about while you were writing your answers. You can come back and change things in a minute if you like, or later when you start making money in a particular niche.
Now you want to write those three things on the left side of a blank piece of paper and space them evenly from the top to the bottom. Then rule a line immediately to the right of the words so that you have two columns on the page. Then in the right column, next to one of the three things you’ve written start breaking down these ideas from different angles into subcategories.
Let’s say you have an interest in learning languages. Write a couple of languages that you have a particular interest in. Can you break these down further? Are there dialects of those languages? Can you identify cultural aspects of the countries that speak those languages? What about foods, sports or travel destinations?
You see how this exercise opens up a whole wider world of different niches that relate to something that you actually have an interest in to begin with! Now what are the chances that you will find that one of these niches has a market hungry for information where you can make a profit?
If you have struggled with this exercise, then take a look at some of the tools and ideas I’ve listed below and then come back to it when you’ve been able to generate a few sparks of inspiration.
There are a number of other different ways of approaching the process of finding a niche that you are passionate about.
Initially at least, you may simply want to browse various niche interests that people have and get a feel for what people are paying attention to and searching for both online and offline. This could even start with a basic wander through your local magazine store. Finding a niche doesn’t have to happen online.
Also you might get a feel for the kind of activity that these niches are generating, in particular whether people interested in these niches are also buying information products online.
A couple of good starter websites to browse are Magazines.com, About.com and SoYouWanna.com.
Take a notepad and write down the topics that interest you. The more the merrier at this stage. When you have a good list search for these topics on Google and see what is listed in the organic and paid search results (the paid results are the classified ads that appear on the right hand side of the screen – and these are particularly useful for narrowing down niches that are making profits online because if advertising dollars are being spent there is a good indication right there that money is being made).
If you’ve managed to narrow down some niche ideas then I recommend the next place you spend time is a dedicated information product site like Clickbank.com or PayDotCom.com.
Here is a screenshot from the Category List page on CBEngine.com (CBEngine.com tracks the popularity and performance of information products being sold on Clickbank). I use this site a lot in finding a niche and researching information products.
This page shows some of the categories and subcategories in which the information products being sold on Clickbank are listed. (Replace subcategories with ‘niche’ and you are on your way to understanding what this is all about if you are still unfamiliar with the idea.)
This is a great site to use to help you identify a popular and profitable niche for information products.
Go to CBEngine (click here for the categories page).
Pick a subcategory that interests you and write it down. It doesn’t matter what it is for now. Next, think about the millions of people online who have an interest in this topic and ask yourself what sort of problems they might be facing that a little information could fix. If they are golfers, do they want to learn how to hit the ball straight? If they are overweight, do they want to learn healthier food options? You get the picture. Now write down your ideas. Are any of these ideas things that you are also interest in?
Now add some market research to find out what kind of products your market are already buying to solve their problems (or what kind of product they would like to buy) and how much they are buying.
You can often do this quickly and easily on forums or sites like Yahoo Answers or Help.com. You can also use CBEngine and Clickbank to find out the price and popularity of the information products that are being sold to the market already and identify the types of products that they are and whether there is any demand for complimentary products or alternatives (eg. videos when the market is saturated with ebooks).
By this stage you have probably identified a possible niche to begin building an online business around to make money online. Don’t worry too much at this point on whether it’s the ‘perfect’ niche. You will learn much more about that as you try to go forward with some action, but for now, if you’ve gone through a number of different brainstorming ideas for finding a niche from this chapter, you can probably be close to certain that you have something that will work.
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