How to choose your niche for internet marketing

The two questions I hear most from people new to internet marketing are, "how do I choose a niche market?" and, "what do I sell to that niche?"

Hearing those two questions for long enough prompted two better questions...

a) "does the niche I'm thinking of consist of people who are currently buying things online right now?"

b) "can I easily contact these online buyers and get them to buy from my web site?"

Admittedly question b) leads to another subject (which I'll deal with another time) but both questions put choosing your niche market seriously into perspective. Everyone I know, or have heard of, that is half-way successful in their internet marketing enterprise has done it by targeting a particular market tightly. Your niche market will become your area of expertise; an area you'll specialize in so that you have a better chance of selling to people who want to buy a given item or group of items. You may want to place ads, write blogs, create web sites and even write articles about your chosen area of business. This involves you doing your homework first because a little research yields great returns. So this is the best way of going about it:

First find out what people are looking for. What do they want to buy most? Then sell the very thing which is being looked for most. I'll take you through the steps. And because the majority of internet marketers are affiliates (who direct traffic to other peoples products and earn a commission for each sale), I'll use the affiliate business model to explain how to choose a niche market.

1. Take your areas of interest and find popular search terms. If you wanted to buy something online, where would you search and what would you type? Start by accurately pinpointing the traffic number results of any search term. Let's say "apple ipod": if they are high this is a good indication of a profitable niche. I use SubmitExpress, Wordtracker, Google Trends and even Google Insights for Search to get keyword traffic popularity and geographic data (if you know the region where the searches are coming from you can get very funky with your marketing by localizing your target niche... but I'll save that for another day!).

2. Now you know which search terms are high ranking, find out what specific products and services people are buying. Go to ClickBank, probably the largest affiliate sales resource on the planet, and look for vendors who are selling products in the relevant niche (you can browse vendors in your niche category or enter your search terms). Write down a list of the top ten products. Go to Amazon and Google, enter your search term and write down the top ten listings for each site.

3. Look at the lists you've written down and you should see a pattern of the most popular products. Remember that although you've now found the items that sell most in the niche that pulls a great number of online searches, it stands to reason that you'll face more competition. But don't worry... that's where great copy comes in. I'll deal with writing great copy in another post.

So, there it is. That's the best way to determine your niche market and what to sell.

Use the comments box below and let me know how you did.

Happy hunting!