Everyone is always talking about niche marketing and how you can make good money if you dedicate yourself and target the right niche. So how are you supposed to know what niche market to target, without wasting your time and ad dollars. Here are a few quick questions and ideas to ask yourself when trying to find and target a new niche market.

1.) Make a Short List of Your Passions
It may sound cheesy or cliché, but it’s going to matter. For example, if you really enjoy watching or playing basketball, then creating a site based on basketball or selling basketball sports supplies, you will probably be that much more dedicated toward working on your site and getting it to work. Not only will you have an interest in your new niche area, but if it’s one of your passions, then you should know a lot about the topic and what you are talking about. Write a short list down of 5-10 passions of yours and see what you can come up with.

2.) Is this a Profitable Niche?
Once you have a few ideas and passions written down, take a look at them and see if there is a high demand or big money being spent in these markets. A very simple way to see if there is a lot of money to be made, is to do a simple Google search, then look at the advertisers on the right hand column. If you are seeing a lot of advertisers, there is usually a high demand for the product or service. Another obvious method for calculating is retail pricing. Will it be better for you to target a less competitive niche market (basketball skills training guides) and sell 100 items and make $10 or each, or try and target an over saturated market (sports tickets) and making $50-$100 per sale?

3.) Is there a Demand for this Niche?
Nearly just as important as how much people are willing to spend on your niche product or service, is how many people actually want it. Using the Google Traffic Estimator, you can get an idea on how often people are searching for a specific niche area or product. Not only will you be given estimates on daily search term traffic, but you can also use this tool as another resource to find how much others are paying to market in this niche, by looking at the average cpc cost.

Just using some simple “basketball” related terms, you can see there are multiple niche markets. You have less cost and traffic for targeting toward people that want to “increase vertical leap“, so it would be easier for you to take advantage of a larger portion of this niche market. On the opposite side, you could sell basketball tickets and memorabilia, where the average advertising is paying more money, with more traffic. Map out your passions and niche markets and see which opportunities make the most sense.

4.) Target Towards Yourself
Once again, going back to basing your new niche market on your passion… as a customer, learn to target towards yourself. If you are going to create a web site based on “increasing your vertical leap“, you should have prior / existing relation to the topic. If you were doing a search on Google for the same topic, what type of information would you want to find on the sites you are visiting. Since you are now the marketer and the potential buyer, you should be able to relate to your customers better than most. Create your new site and niche market to cater as much to your users as possible.

5.) Stay in It to Win It
If you are going to target to a niche market and find you are doing well with it, I would recommend focusing on this niche area for the long haul. Depending on what you are targeting it may be extremely difficult, or quite possible for you to become one of the main and prominent sites in this area. If you are going to target towards people looking to increase their basketball jumping ability vs. selling sports tickets, you will probably have a lot more success with the prior. Not only will you have less competition from heavily funded companies in search marketing, but if you provide a quality site and/or product in a small niche area, you can get a ton of exposure and sales from word of mouth. Before selecting your new niche market, ask yourself… “Can I become one of the top 5% marketers/sites in this area?”

These are just a few questions and tips to consider when starting in a new niche area. Niche marketing can be very fun and profitable, or very frustrating and a waste of time and money. Before jumping into a new niche market, make sure that you take the time and effort to map out your business plan.

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