A 4-Step System for Uncovering Hot Niche Markets
By James Allen
Whether you are an affiliate marketer, a website designer or you make your living creating and marketing infoproducts such as ebooks, discovering profitable niche markets to exploit is probably at the top of your "to-do" list. The following is a four-step system you can apply anytime you need to find a new niche audience to target and profit from.
1. Initial Brainstorming
This first step is best approached with a very open mind and a notebook and pen handy. The idea is to seek topics that are outside your current realm of knowledge. One of the best ways to do this is by reading blogs.
Bloggers come from every walk of life, and you will find blogs with information on almost any niche topic imaginable. Best of all, bloggers provide fresh, timely information.
Start spending some time reading some random blogs. A good starting place would be at blog directories such as Blogdex - http://www.blogdex.net . As you are reading, you'll discover many different topics being discussed. Many of these you may have never heard of before. Start writing these down.
Example: You found yourself reading a blog post that described the blogger's recent experience at a demolition derby. Maybe you don't know much yourself about this niche, so you add "demolition derby" to your list.
2. Research
Once you have a list of several possible niches, the next step is to find out what keywords and phrases people are using to search for this and related information via the major search engines. Good Keywords -http://www.goodkeywords.com for example, is a free Windows software you can download that will help you do just this. With this program, you can type-in a topic from your list and the software will begin to uncover many related phrases being actively searched for.
It takes time to get the hang of this software, but once you master it you will be able to generate large and valuable lists. After you uncover at least a few dozen related phrases, save your list and move onto the next step. If you are not able to uncover many related phrases, chances are there is not much potential here and you should start over with another topic from step one.
Example: Using Good Keywords or a similar tool, you enter the term "demolition derby". You soon have a large list of related phrases people have been using to search for information on this topic, such as "demolition derby video" and "demolition derby car for sale".
3. Secondary Idea Creation
Read through the list you generated. Some of your phrases are going to give you ideas for other target audiences you may want to explore in the future. Take some time now to write these new ideas down while they are still fresh in your mind. Save this information for later reference. You can never have enough fresh ideas to explore when trying to uncover under-exploited niche markets.
Example: One of the phrases in your "demolition derby" list was "demolition derby game online" - you note that later you should explore what other types of online games people are searching for.
4. Niche Potential Analysis
If you used Good Keywords to mine for phrases, you will have also been provided with an approximate number of times each of these terms was searched for during the past month. The next thing you need to do is compare this number, representing potential search engine traffic, with the number of websites already catering directly to these searches.
To do this, start by taking your phrases and do an exact phrases search on each of them at Google, making certain to surround your phrase in quotes. Write down the number of results google brings back for your search. Next,
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