A few tricks about finding niches that I learned in the course I’m taking at University 20/20. The lesson is a good one, in practical terms and in terms of general success tactics…

Take the Easy Route

A lot of people, when they are starting a blog, or any other type of business venture online, want to re-invent the wheel or more accurately, pretend that they have invented the wheel. Think of how silly that is, the Internet is, by it’s nature a vast, easily navigated, repository of information. And thanks to search engines, we can easily reverse engineer all the sites that are successful doing exactly what we want to do.

Most Niche Research is Already Done for You

Here’s some sites that you can start with that have extensive directory structures based on established niches:

• Thomasnet (for B2B topics)
• eBay (you’ll need to sign up for an account to access the advanced search features)
• About (check out the channels)
• DMOZ
• Amazon
• Commission Junction
• Copeac

You should also search for directories of products or sites that are more focused on your topic. Since my site is loosely about information products and making money online, I’d also visit:

• Clickbank

Drill down into the categories that relate to your site and see how they are structured. At this point you should just be keeping notes and gathering possibilities for where to position your site.

I don’t think there are any hard and fast guidelines for picking a topic. In some cases going micro might be the best idea (being a big fish in a small pond) and in other cases being average in a very large niche could be wildly profitable.

The goal of this section is to develop some measure of amount of money changing hands in a niche. If you compare two topics on eBay, or two sub topics, then you can figure out a formula based on number of sold items times average sold value over the last 7 days. If you apply this formula across a few (or many) different sub-niches, then you’ll get a clear picture of where the most money is.

In our course we had an exercise to go to eBay and do a complete analysis for 8 sub-niches of the topic “Nursery Sheet Sets.” Firstly, it was amazing to see the amount of money changing hands in a niche as tiny as this and secondly one of the 8 sub-niches had 2.5 times the penitential revenue of any of the others. So if you were building a website on “Nursery Sheet Sets” then you would have a very good idea of where to begin targeting your market to get profitable ASAP.

At the end of this section you should have a decent definition of your niche, and know that there is money changing hands and a rough idea of how much money there is relative to related topics.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.