How do You Find a Niche?

[LukeMoulton]

Thought this might be a good topic for discussion as everyone has their own methods for finding niches.

How do you come up with niche ideas and discover a market before registering a domain, building a site, developing a product or marketing an affiliate product?

Here are some ideas to kick things off:

• Local newsagent - magazines can be a good indicator that a topic has a solid readership. Flicking through mags can give you ideas of micro niches
• Trawl through Amazon sub-categories and popular products
• Twitter trends
• Google Keyword Tool (you need a niche idea before starting your start digging though)
• Google Trends & Insights
• Website trading sites (Flippa etc)

Let's hear your niche finding and trend spotting ideas, tips and tools.

[3Six]

Good suggestions.

Better than Amazon may be trawling through CB, paydotcom etc., as those sellers are IMs who've already likely done an analysis of the niche and decided that it's worth chasing.

Also, Zeitgeist.

[hooperman]

If you can find what prolific sellers have in their signature links in forums they visit you can get some ideas. They've probably done all the research for you. Also looking at the weird serch terms that keep bringing visitors to existing sites you own.

[tke71709]

[*]Google Keyword Tool (you need a niche idea before starting your start digging though)

The one thing that I heartily recommend if you are going to go this route is to buy a tool to automate at least some of the process like Micro Niche Finder.

[LukeMoulton]

Personally I'm a fan of Market Samurai - fairly similar to Micro Niche Finder by the looks of it.

[tke71709]

Very similar, I had MNF first so I stick with it

[Clinton]

I never cease to be amazed at the areas in which there's money to be made. But would any of the suggestions above have come up with this site I posted in BSTE? She makes $3,000 a month telling women how to tie their hair up.

Finding niches on which to build turnkey sites is a useful activity for people selling the dream of making money online. However, the actual making of money relies not in the niche. Choose an apparently highly lucrative niche and you'll make no money if there's already floods of competition in there.

Should you find a money niche with zero competition, it's still not about the niche but what you do with the site. The emphasis on niche is, I believe, highly misplaced. It's self-serving beguilement practised by scamsters. I would encourage Flippa to not contribute to that baloney.

From my experience, making money in a niche is 1% the niche and 99% what you do with the site. Like the hair site example above. Her passion and interest in the subject combined with the right promotion skills made the site profitable. If she had started a site on one of those theoretically profitable niches in which she had no expertise I doubt she'd have made a fraction of what she did.

Sorry, Luke, but that's what I think about all the effort people spend finding niches to work in. I don't mean to ruin your thread and others are free to come up with further suggestions for you.

[LukeMoulton]

The emphasis on niche is, I believe, highly misplaced. It's self-serving beguilement practised by scamsters. I would encourage Flippa to not contribute to that baloney.

Clinton, I started this thread as I'm personally interested in the art and science of finding niches and I thought it could help other readers who are struggling to come up with their first - or next - idea. Perhaps I should start putting a disclaimer: "These comments are the opinion of Luke Moulton and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of his past, future or current employer ....".

Looking at niches is just a great way to brainstorm ideas for your next site or business, it's about finding a need, a market, before you do anything. Of course, you should do your due diligence on a niche before you even register a domain, and having an interest or passion in the niche may mean the difference between a couple of dollars a month to several thousand.

[Clinton]

LOL, I wasn't helping the discussion by saying that looking for a niche isn't the best way to start

In my defence, that was a personal opinion.

OK, my contribution to the ideas is based on my personal experience: start your search by first drawing up a list of things you like talking about and subjects you have some experience/knowledge in. I know that seems a bit old-fashioned in a world of - what's it? - Market Samurai and DNF, but I reckon it's a good method.

[3Six]

If you're starting with niches that you have a personal interest in then the simplest and most effective tool is a Google search. The number of advertisers for that keyword tells you more about how lucrative it is than anything else can.