What's My Niche?
Niche Research*

Some people begin by just knowing they want to start a business centered around say ‘Bird Watching’ or ‘Baby Tips’ or ‘Dog Training’.

Others know they want to start a business – because they’re tired of working for ‘The Man’ (or ‘The Woman’, don’t want to seem sexist here) and want to trade in that little cubicle and be their own boss.

Whichever group you fall in, you want to do Niche research BEFORE you do anything else.  Wouldn’t you hate to develop a website and tons of articles and a blog and be scratching your head wonder why all the droves of ‘Ant Farm’ enthusiast had not beaten a path to your website?

Let’s start with those who have no idea in what niche they want to work.   It’s fairly easy to find profitable niches.   What are they advertising on TV (besides political candidates)?

Go to your local Wal-Mart and cruise the magazine isles.   What topics do the magazines cover?  Brides, Babies, Wrestling, Body Building, Fashion, and Health and Beauty are all niches they’ve built magazines around.

And what type of products would interest these people?   Buy a few of the magazines.   What are they advertising in the magazines?  These advertisers wouldn’t be advertising in this niche if they didn’t think they’d make a profit.

Once you have an idea of several niches which might be both profitable and of interest to you, try to find out where groups of people who are interested in this niche hang out. (Tip: Save time and choose several different niches to research at a time.  If they all turn out to be profitable, then lucky you.   But chances are, at least some will not be what you're looking for.

Now at this point, whether you already know your niche or are still trying to decide, from here on out both groups should continue on in the same manner.  Go to Yahoo Groups.  Type in your chosen niches.  This will tell you if there are groups meeting online in this niche.  Let’s look at ‘ant farms’.   As you will see, there are a number of groups surrounding this term.   (Note: There are also several ads being purchased surrounding this term as well, by looking on the right side of the page.)

Are there magazines devoted to the ‘Ant Farm’ enthusiast?  Go to Google and type in ‘forum ant farm’ and see how many come up.  (Tip: if you have a potential niche that doesn’t have at least one forum, it’s probably not a large enough market to turn a profit.  )

Then visit the free Trellian Keyword Discovery Tool or Free Wordtracker Tool.  Type in first the words Ant Farm and then Myrmecology (the study of ants).  There were over 4000 searches done this past month on the term Ant Farm.  However, the word myrmecology had only 200 searches in a month.

After going down the list of words and phrases being search it’s easy to see that many of the searches being done are not by people who are interested in ants or ant products but rather are most interested in the lyrics from songs by the group ‘Alien Ant Farm’.

Then do a Google search with the words “ant farm” and “myrmecology” in quotes.   There are 3.4 million websites with information about Ant Farms – but more importantly, are there people buying ads to advertise there on the ‘ant farm’ search results.  Actually there are quite a few.

There are 26,000 websites about myrmecology – but there are not any ads being purchased on this topic.  Hmmmmmm.  There doesn’t seem to be much interest in the study of ants but there is a bit of a following for the ant farm.

If you were to find an article or two or a squidoo lens on the first page of Google about the term you’re searching, you’ve probably hit on a hot market.

Let’s see what Google Trends says.  Compare the terms ‘ant farm’, and several other keywords or keyphrases, at least one of which you know is something which is selling right now, such as say ‘ringtones’ (that may be too hot a term), or ‘online dating’ or ‘dog training’.  Separate the keywords of phrases by a comma and compare the graft.

As you can see, online dating and ringtones are showing a gradual decline but are still very hot trends.   Dog training is a steady, but much lower trend, I guess people will always need to train their dogs.  But ant farms are sort of carpeting the bottom of the graft.

After analyzing this niche, I’d say there is probably not enough business to justify the time and expense of building a business around it.  Probably not a big surprise for anyone reading this, but now you know.

The other three niches might be areas to explore, but you would want to check out your competition first.   All three of these niches are very tough to get into; lots of competition.

And there you have it.   You continue this process until you have what will be a profitable niche.  Remember, you’re looking for a crowd of people, hungry for niche related products . . . then you simply provide those products and you have your business.  It's supply and demand - if there is no demand, it doesn't matter what you're supplying, it won't sell.   Look for a hungry crowd!

But where do you find the products?   Your next step is Product Research.

* This is a long article, but it describes a critical step in starting a business online.   Skip Niche Research at your own peril.