A niche(pronounced either “Nitch” or “Neesh”) is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing. Choosing the right niche is crucial if you want to be a successful affiliate. In this course, I’ll show you how to select a sub-niche in the fitness market.
I realize that 9 out of 10 times, people will not understand what a niche is when presented with the explanation above. Most people will understand it when an example is given. Here they are :
Example 1 :
Market: Health and fitness
Niche : Muscle building
Sub-niche: Muscle building for men
Micro-niche: Muscle building for men over 40
Micro-micro niche : Muscle building for men over 40 who have kids
Example 2 :
Market: Relationship
Niche : Dating
Sub-niche: Dating for men
Micro-niche: Dating for men over 40
Micro-micro niche: Dating for men over 40 who have kids
Now, you may be wondering : “why don’t I just target an entire market so that I can achieve maximum profits?” How I wish that was the case. It sounds counter-intuitive, but by targeting everyone, you end up targeting no one. Before starting a business of any kind, you must first define your audience.
Let me tell you three hypothetical stories to illustrate the importance of defining your audience and choosing the right niche:
Story 1:
Paul intends to open a store selling kitchenware. He opens his store, and stocks his warehouse with every type of kitchenware available, from ovens to pots and pans. His first week went well. Sales were average. After a week,sales began to decline, and after a month, he had zero sales. Why is that?
After some extensive research he found out that Walmart had opened up a branch distanced one mile from his store. Turns out all his previous customers now shop at Walmart because they had lower prices and a wider variety of kitchenware. Mr.Paul couldn’t compete with Walmart in terms of
price and variety, and ended up closing his store. He loses his primary income stream and is now broke. He loses his wife and kids, and now suffers from depression. He kneels to the ground and shouts : WHY DIDN’T I DEFINE MY AUDIENCE!!!
Story 2:
Tony, a friend of Paul who too had a kitchenware store, heard about Paul’s story,and was determined not to make the mistake of not defining his audience. He pledged to stock only one type of kitchen appliance that would appeal to only one group of people. He filled his store with a special toaster that could only toast brown Arepa bread with the thickness of 3.512312^13 inches. Tony said to himself: “Paul you fool, you should have chosen a mirco-micro niche like me! Soon, hundreds of targeted customers will swarm to my store to buy my special toasters!”. Days passed, all the customers that entered his store left empty-handed. Months passed.
Surprisingly, Tony had 2 sales, but obviously, it wasn’t enough to cover his expenses. And like Paul, Tony ended up poor and miserable.
Story 3:
After witnessing the demise of Paul and Tony’s businesses, Albert decided to be smart about his strategy. He knew the best way to succeed in the kitchenware business was to choose a sub-niche that would target a particular group of people in the market(avoiding Paul’s mistake), while appealing to a wide-enough audience(avoiding Tony’s mistake). He opened a store that only contained toaster ovens with a few brands. Sure enough, Albert got rich in no time, and is grateful for avoiding Paul’s and Tony’s mistakes. When asked about the reason so many customers were buying from him, Albert replied: “By only carrying toaster ovens, I establish myself as the go-to guy for toaster ovens; And though Walmart sells them at a lower price, people still buy from me as I’m perceived as an authority in toaster ovens. However, I was careful not to be too targeted in my approach to ensure a demand in my sub-niche.”
After reading the three stories, I don’t have to ask you whose shoes you would want to be in. The three stories emphasize the importance of market research and niche selection. It’s vital to choose a sub-niche that is targeted enough but not too obscure that there’s no market for it. In some cases, a
sub-niche may still be too general. In which case, you might want to choose a mirco-niche of that market instead. Later on, I’ll show you how to gauge demand.
Now, it’s time to get our hands dirty. Remember, don’t panic if you get stuck. Read the guide thoroughly and implement the methods.
Niche research
When it comes to niche selection, you’ve probably heard this advice countless time: “follow your passion”. While there is merit to this advice, just because one is passionate about something, that doesn’t mean there's a market for the thing he/she is passionate about. Now, this certainly deserves a separate story, a funny one at that, but I’ll spare you the details ;)
My advice is to first follow the green, then follow the dream. Find multiple profitable niches, then select the one that you have an affinity for. The first step is to find a broad niche that you might want to target,and then drilling down to a sub-niche.
Finding your niche:
* Using Magazines
Magazines are a great way to find profitable niche. A magazine with a subscriptions and retail distribution typically cost between 6 million and $9 billion per year to publish. Magazines publishers will only print a magazine when they know that there is an audience for that niche and that advertisers are willing to spend money to reach them.
1.) Go to magazines.com.
One of the easiest ways to find magazines already sorted by niche is Magazines.com. At the top of the screen you will see an “All Categories” tab which if you click will present you with a list of different topics.
2.)For example, in the Health&Fitness category, I chose this magazine. It’s titled Men’s health with a male model. The apparent sub-niche would be “muscle building for men”. Easy, right?
* Using Google
Another way to find a sub-niche is by using Google.
1.) Go to google.com
2.) Type in your seed keyword in the search box.
3.) Your keyword would be your sub-niche. For example, muscle building for men.
4.) Behind your seed keywords, enter the term: for “*”
5.) Voila! You’ve got a list of sub-niches right in front of you!
Compile a list of sub-niches, as many as possible.
After building your huge list of sub-niches, we’re going to choose the one that you’re going to pursue. We have to evaluate the market of the sub-niches that we’ve compiled.
Here are some of the techniques that you can use to confirm the demand in a particular sub-niche.
* Google Keyword Planner
To use the Google keyword planner tool you will need to have first register a Google Adwords account. The account does not have to have any money credited to it. You can even have been banned from Google Adwords and still use the Keyword Planner Tool.
1.) If you haven’t done it already, create an account at
https://accounts.google.com/SignUp
2.) Login to your Adwords account at adwords.google.com
3.) Select the first option
4) Search your key term in the search box. For example, if your sub-niche is “weight loss for women” type that into the search box.
5.) You can also see how many people each month are searching for a particular search terms. This will give you an idea of the relative popularity of a particular keyword term. If you see numbers above 1000, that’s a good sign.
* Using Quantcast
Another way to determine the demand in a particular niche is to look at how many visitors some of the most popular sites in that niche are receiving.
1.) To find these websites simply perform a search and write down the URLs for the top 10 websites for that particular search. Take note whether there are Google Adwords ads. This means there are people spending money in this sub-niche. And people wouldn’t be spending money if there wasn’t a
market.
2.) Then, go to Quantcast.com and enter the URL one by one on the homepage search box.
3.) This will give you detailed information about the number of people that are visiting that particular website. Not only will you be able see how many people are visiting the website but you will usually get detailed demographic information. Included are the age, gender and educational background of the visitors to the site. This can be useful information when deciding whether a particular niche will be profitable and how to market to this audience. It’s a good sign if there’s a high number of monthly visitors to the site
Do this for every sub-niche, and pick only 5 that satisfy these criteria:
- The key term for the sub-niche has at least 3000 searches a month
-There are Google Adwords Ads on the front page when the term is searched in Google.
- The top 10 websites of your sub-niche have a high number of monthly visits.
