What is a Niche? (and how do you find the right one?)

A niche in its simplest form is a sub-section of a broader market. For example, homeowners are a market, but homeowners who need foundation repairs are a sub-section, or niche, of that larger market. Fashion is a market, but Prada shoes is a niche in that market. Dog owners are a market, but dog potty training is a niche. Basically, a niche is a narrow market of people who have the same interests, desires, and problems.

In affiliate marketing niches are everything, you must have a market to sell to or you can’t make any money – makes sense right? So how do you find the niche that’s right for you? There are three ways:

Do What You Love and The Money Will Follow
This is what every IM guru on the face of the planet teaches, if you’re a programmer, make a site on programming, if you love corn farming, make a site on corn farming, etc. This is great advice if you have some skills and knowledge that people would be interested in. Also, if you are passionate about a subject it follows that you will be more interested in writing the million blog posts you’ll eventually need as well as engaging in lots of dialog with your readers – plus you know the subject already so you should know what your customers are going to be interested in buying.

Find a Niche You Have an Interest In and Become an Expert
Let’s say you don’t have any special skills or knowledge. That’s ok, you’re a salesman right? You don’t need any of that, you can just find a niche and start selling! True, but the best salesmen have a passion for their product and believe that what they are selling can help make a difference in peoples lives, so don’t just grab any ‘ol niche, think of niches that you have an interest in learning about so that when it comes time to sell the product you will feel emotionally attached and you won’t burn out doing all the research.

Find Something Hot and Sell It
You can check out Ebay Pulse, Amazon’s Best Seller Lists, or Google Trends to find hot products. Once you have a product that is selling like hot cakes you promote it. Hopefully, someone sees your promotion and buys the item through your link and you make money.

The key to niche marketing is finding a niche where people are willing to hand over their hard-earned cash for your product. This usually means that these people have a problem that needs to be solved, I.E. Fish owners who need to know how to keep their salt-water fish alive, bodybuilders who need to lose that last percentage of body fat before the big competition, women who need that perfect lip gloss for the big date, etc. Your job is to come up with a solution for the problems of your niche, if the niche doesn’t have any problems to solve then you can’t actually sell them anything.

So here’s what you need to do right now. Sit down with a piece of paper and brainstorm 20 niche ideas, yes 20 of them. Don’t censor yourself, just let the ideas flow – you can cross off the super crazy ones later. =) Try to think of the things you are good at, your hobbies, your interests, things that you might be an expert in or things that you’d like to become an expert in – write them all down until you have a list of at least 20 items – many of them won’t pan out so it’s good to have a large list to draw from.

A great way to find topics that you might be interested in or just to get the ideas flowing is to go to Amazon.com and browse their site. There is a wealth of markets shown, and when you drill-down into each section you are sure to come up with some specific niches that interest you. Try the magazine section, pick out the magazines you enjoy and try to think if there’s some way to further segment it down. For example, maybe you read Golf Digest, golfers are a pretty nice market right? Lots of disposable income, plenty of problems to solve, plenty of products to sell, but you don’t want to try and market to all golfers – that’s too big of a bite to take – you need a specific problem. Maybe you focus on people who need to putt better, or who need swing lessons, or golfers who want discounts on their green fees. It’s a big market and there is bound to be plenty of niches within it. The same goes for any of the other markets. Find what interests you and then segment it down to a smaller section that has a need you can fulfill.

Once you have your 20 niches we’ll move on to how to find out if the niche you chose will be profitable. See you next post!

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