Ways to Get Niche Market Ideas
So here are some ways that you can get ideas for what niche market you want to enter:
Own Hobbies/Interests
Have you any hobbies or interests that you have more than a beginner’s knowledge in that you can teach people things that are slightly behind you in the learning curve?
For example, I like to go to the gym regularly and I like to research and experiment with muscle building techniques in the gym. I could create a product showing people what I’m doing to build muscle to show them where to start, if they also want to get fit and build muscle. I could be my own case study, record my weight and take photos of myself before I start my muscle building program and then record my progress and what I’m doing and then sell that to people who want to learn to do the same thing, once I have achieved what I set out to achieve.
Maybe you also go to the gym, maybe you like cycling and go often. Maybe you’re a car enthusiast who could show people how to do specific things within mechanics.
Are there any hobbies or interests that you have that you could create or sell information in how to do a specific thing that other people would find helpful?
This also helps if you are going to create your own product, if it is something that you are passionate about, you can create the content without getting fed up of what you are doing (as easily!), because you’re interested in it in the first place and you want to share your passion for the topic and help others who want to use your experience as guidance.
Friends’ or Family’s Hobbies/Interests
As above, but for people you know, friends or family. This could even help overcome the product creation barrier, if you think that you wouldn’t be able to create your own product. You could get them to show people how to do something and then use the content to in your online marketing business.
You could also use this as way to get round credibility, if you’re not sure that people would listen to what you have to say. For example, I have a friend who has a degree in languages and has spent some time living in Barcelona and giving Spanish students extra English tuition. I could leverage that and film him teaching me the basics of Spanish, so that people can follow along, and make and sell that as a product.
Magazines in Shops
You can find out about niche markets that you may not have even thought of by looking in shops that sell magazines, at the different publications that they have.
This way you’ll also know that the niche is profitable, because you are looking at publications about it that are already produced on a mass scale and are selling.
You’d be surprised at the amount of broken down niche market magazines you can find in shops, that you either wouldn’t have considered before or would have just brushed off, assuming it wouldn’t sell.
There is a popular shop in the UK called WHSmiths, which sells magazines, here is a screenshot of the categories of magazines that they have:
I’m just going to click on one at random and see if I can narrow down a niche market that I could potentially go into:
So here we have some craft related magazines that are selling on WHSmith’s website. Sewing and card making are 2 of the potential niche markets that you could go into. You could start a business showing people how to make their own greetings cards.
Amazon Book Categories
Similar to seeing what magazines there are out there, you can look at the book categories that books are selling in on Amazon. And that goes for Kindle as well as physical books.
Simply go to the search box at the top of Amazon, select “Books” from the categories on the left, leave the search box blank and click “Go”.
Then, on the left hand side, there’ll be all the categories of books that Amazon sells.
Here are just some of the categories, but you’ll want to look for the non fictional ones that you can show people how to do things in:
You can now get niche market ideas by seeing what there are books about in these categories. Let’s have a look at health, fitness and dieting:
And already we can see several niche markets in one category: paleo dieting, weight loss for Mothers, gluten free diets, diseases and ailments.
So, by browsing around Amazon’s book and Kindle categories, you can find many different niche markets that you can potentially go into.
Celebrities
This may seem an odd way to find a niche market, but if you’re reading the newspaper or listening to the radio and you hear that a particular celebrity has become engaged or got married or is expecting a child, you could find out about niche markets that they are experts in.
For example, I won’t name names, but there was a famous UK chef that was in the papers recently and this could make you think of what sort of cooking that that chef might specialize in and you could use that as a niche. This one, and I actually own the cookbook, has a book of recipes that are developed to be cooked quickly, if you don’t have a lot of spare time. So cooking for people who are busy might be a niche you could start a business in online.
Now this is a little hidden gem that I came across a couple of years or so ago and I actually forgot what it was called, only that it was a number. However, after a little bit of research, I managed to find the website, 43things.com.
This is a GOLDMINE! 43 Things is a goal setting community, set up as a word cloud, with bigger words being things that are popular that people want to do. So you can browse through and see what things people want to do, that you could build an online business around.
Some examples I’m picking out from this:
How to make computer programs,
How to run a mile every day,
How to reinvent yourself,
How to remove hair,
How to get back to healthy eating habits,
How to start fishing.
There are many more, as you can see, hopefully you get the idea!
Google “Bucketlist”
Type “bucketlist” into Google and you can get ideas for what other people are doing with their lives, or want to do with their lives, that are niche markets that you could get into.
Here are the websites relating to what people have on their bucket lists.
And, by clicking on the first one, you can get some ideas of niche markets that people want to do things in that you can sell to them:
Obviously there are things that you couldn’t create a product on, like drinking vodka in Russia, but you could get ideas from that, like teaching people to speak Russian!
There are more on the right hand side as well, like getting engaged. The market for things regarding getting married and weddings is huge! You’ve got speeches; you’ve got how to look good for the wedding, planning the wedding, to name a few.
For Dummies
Here is a website with a myriad of “how to” type books and manuals. This is also a great example of how you don’t have to be an expert to create a product on a certain topic. You can merely report what an expert has to say, that’s what the For Dummies books do.
I clicked on the Food and Drink category and found the following:
Smoothies, down the bottom right of the screenshot, you could create a product about different smoothie recipes and how to make them, different smoothies for different needs like weight loss or energy.
PLR Websites
In case you don’t know what PLR is, it’s where you can buy the rights to a product and then sell it as your own. There are variations on what rights you get from the original owner of the PLR, like permission to edit the document, whether you can sell it or give it away, among other things.
There are websites online that sell lots of PLR products and you can browse the categories that they have PLR in and get ideas for a niche to enter.
Here is one PLR website that I know of and frequent:
On the right hand side of The PLR Store, you can see a list of the categories of eBooks and articles that they are selling.
To pick out some that you could start a business on, you have:
Blogging,
Bodybuilding,
Diabetes,
Email marketing.
Clickbank Categories
Clickbank is a market for affiliate products. You can find products to promote for a commission. Finding different products that people have already created in niche markets, can give you an idea of a niche market that you can go into for yourself:
The above is a screenshot of the Clickbank home page. When you click on “Marketplace” at the top right menu, you go through to the following page:
Now, on the left, the red boxes expand into other niche markets when you click on them. Also, the banner above those red boxes, Tinnitus Remedy, is an idea for a niche market already!
Click on one of those and you can see the products that people have on the Clickbank marketplace, to further drill down into the niches.
Diabetic recipes and ways to decorate cakes are a couple of niche markets that can be seen in the above screenshot.
JV Zoo Categories
Similar to Clickbank, JV Zoo is another website that you can go to that you can find affiliate products to promote:
Click on “Marketplace” at the top and you can see all the markets that are on JV Zoo:
Now click on any of the markets and you can see what products are being sold in that niche market:
Here we can see that there are people out there that are looking for ways to save money on their education, educational tools for children to help their learning and how to control debts.
Facebook Pages
Looking for Facebook pages that are promoting products in different niche markets can give you ideas of a niche market that you can enter.
For example, type “dieting” into the search bar in Facebook and click “See More Results” at the bottom of the drop down menu:
You can search for pages and groups that are based around dieting, to get niche market ideas, in this case, the pages option brings up Paleo Dieting again:
This may seem quite vague at first, but you can use Google to find niches you didn’t know could be turned into markets for information products.
By searching for “how to get *” or “ways to get *”, you can get Google to suggest things for you:
Just from there you can see that there are websites about how to get rid of gas and bloating, be productive (get sh** done!) and ways to get your coffee fix.
Other things that you can type in could be:
“how to lose *”,
“how to become *”,
“how to reduce *”,
“how to get rid of *”,
“how to stop *”,
you get the idea!
There are also Google suggestions that can give you ideas of niche markets. For example, you could type in “how to lose weight” and see what is suggests to search for:
There are a LOT of possibilities for this. And it also helps that Google is suggesting those things based on what people are actually searching for, which also would suggest that there is a sufficient amount of people searching for that kind of thing.
Ways to See if a Niche is Profitable
Now that you have some ways to find a niche market to begin your business in, whether it be actually creating products (don’t let this scare you!) or selling someone else’s product or service for a commission, let’s look at how you can find out how you can see if a niche is profitable, whether people are making money from it already.
You wouldn’t want to waste time and money starting a business if you aren’t going to be able to sell to people in the given niche market.
Search Engine Adverts
If there are companies already advertising on search engines, when you do searches related to your niche market, this is a great sign. Let’s look at a blatantly obvious niche market that money can be made in!
As you can see there are loads of adverts, at the top of the search results and up the side of the organic listings.
Let’s look at one that is a noticeable contrast to this:
In the above image there are no adverts to be seen in the Google listings for “how to make a basketball hoop”. These are 2 extreme examples but they show the point I’m trying to make!
Media Buys on Websites
When you do a Google search for things related to your niche market and you find websites and blogs etc, do you see banners and adverts for products on those websites? This is a good sign that there are products being sold and people making money from this niche.
Here’s a website I found when I searched for “how to build arm muscle”:
You can see, if you go to the website and scroll through, there are various adverts for related products and services to men’s health and fitness products.
Whereas a website around how to make a basket:
While there are adverts, they aren’t related to what the person who’s looking for information on making a paper basket would find useful to what they want to do.
Facebook Ads
If you see ads in Facebook for the niche market that you want to get into, then this shows people are willing to pay for ads to that target audience. This also is based on the assumption that you are interested in the niche market already, having liked pages related to it, because ads are being targeted at you.
Let’s look at what’s being advertised to me:
While the Amazon gift card will be a mass interest thing, GoToMeeting is a webinar software, but this could be used across different niches because it’s a tool rather than specific information. However, the following advert shows a niche that can be monetized:
In this case, because I’m an Aston Villa fan, I’m being targeted to bet on a match. This shows that gambling is a niche market that businesses are willing to spend money to advertise in.
Here’s another, showing that people who want to get traffic to their websites is a niche market that people are spending money on advertising in:
Facebook Groups/Pages With Followers
This is one that shows more that people are passionate about a niche market, but that’s still an indicator that might suggest that people are willing to spend money. Also, the pages of businesses that have taken the time to build a page show that there is potentially money to be made.
Here is a great sign that people are very interested in getting 6 pack abs/a flat stomach. There may not seem to be a lot of people in the groups, but there are a lot of them and some have higher numbers. Also, some of the groups being private shows that they only want certain people in their group. This might be because they have bought a product and are offered a Facebook group as a bonus to the purchase.
Books That Are Selling on Amazon
This is pretty straight forward: if a book on a given topic is making lots of sales on Amazon, then you can be confident that there is money to be made.
Here’s an example with a book with a lot of reviews, showing that it is being bought:
And here’s a recent book that’s sold enough enough in the first few days to make me think that there’s money to be made:
Here’s another niche market that I’ve found by typing it into Amazon, just out of curiosity, because a friend of mine has them on his house and says the electricity company pay him for the energy that they produce:
Sales in Affiliate Networks
If you see products selling in the niche you are researching, when you browse affiliate networks, and they are selling, there is a good chance that there is money to be made in that niche market.
I specify that they are selling, because, while someone has taken the time to create a product on a given niche market, you can get a better idea of what the niche market is like by how well the product is received by the market