Choosing a Profitable Niche – A Practical Guide!

In my previous post I mentioned that choosing the right niche is crucial to succeeding with your niche site. In that post, I gave the criteria I normally use when researching a niche market and then promised to also give you a practical guide on how to pick a profitable niche. In this post I want to fulfill that promise.

So, if you are ready let’s get on with it!

Recommended: Riches in Niches Power Challenge: How to Pick a Profitable Niche Market!

Where Do You Look For Profitable Niches?

The truth is if you do not know where to begin your research, you will waste a lot of time running around! Now, I must say for your niche site to meet the criteria we set out you must stay away from anything “internet marketing” or “make money online”! Instead go for real, tangible products!

Why Real, Tangible Products?

There are lots of reasons but for this post I will simply say when you build you niche site around real, tangible products, you would be selling physical products and not some theoretical concepts. You would be delivering something of actual, tangible value to your customers and of course you don’t need to grabble with those pushy persuasion techniques you see on Clickbank.com!

Besides, building your niche site around physical products agrees greatly with the basic principle we are working with which is:

1.    Build a niche site that is optimized for the search engines…
2.    So, when a potential customer goes to the search engine and searches for a product…
3.    Your niche site shows up…
4.     The potential customer clicks to visit your site, looks around and then follows your affiliate link to the product site and there, make purchases…
5.    And then, you get your commission!

It’s that simple and honest, too!

You don’t have to use some underhand marketing tactics or some pushy salesmanship to “hand twist” the visitor because with physical products, the value of the product is obvious to the buyer already!

So, Where Do You Look For Profitable Physical Products?

Here are some good places to look: Amazon.com, ebay.com, Overstock.com, Rakuten.com (buy.com) and of course Google.com/shopping. For this guide, I’m going to use Amazon.com and a few other free online tools to show you how to pick a profitable niche.

So let’s begin.

Step #1: What Is Already Selling Out There?

For this step I could start either by first going to Amazon.com to see what is already selling there or I could use Google keyword research tool to know what others are looking for.

If you want to start with Amazon.com and work backward, what you simply do is visit the site and then specify “Books” to search. Then enter a niche you desire to target (you must have known this). Take a look at the results.   The number of books written on the subject at Amazon.com is an indication of how much that market spends on the topic. When you see people spending money, you have a potentially profitable niche!

Once you confirm that (1) The niche is targeted enough and (2) The niche is spending money, your next move is to know if the niche is big enough. From there you have to go on and use any keyword research tool of your choice.

For this guide, I’m working the other way round, starting with keyword research first and then going on to Amazon.com!

Step #2: Where Do I Look?

Here I’m assuming that I do not know what niche to target. So, I’ll start by using one of the “discovery keywords” I mentioned in the previous post – “how do you stop.”

I took that and entered it into Google’s search box and received the following suggestions:

Niche Site Product Research

Notice the two phrases I underlined. I will be working with these two but with special focus on the first one!

Step #2: What Really Is The Demand?

Next I will proceed to know if the demand is high enough. Is this niche a popular one? Are people looking to buy products in it?

So working with “how do you stop snoring” I opened Google’s keyword tool and entered this keyword phrase. Please note that I selected “Exact” as the match type. Here is a graphic of what I received:

getting details about the niche site research

 

There are actually two things that are my focus here these are “Competition” and “Global Monthly Searches!”

The competition is an indication of how other “sellers” sees this market. You’ll notice that for our example the indication is “high.” It is clear from all the keyword phrases returned in this experiment!

NOTE: A word about this competition. I have heard many say if this is high you should stay away from it because it means you will be up against a big competition. Unfortunately, it is not so!  This is only true if you’re using Google Adwords for your promotion. If however, your niche site will be monetized through Google Adsense and other affiliate products, going for this is your best bet!

For me, I don’t use Google Adwords. Search engine optimization is my specialty and writing SEO optimized web content is my stock in trade! And so, I actually look out for a high “Competition” as it is an indication profitability!

Step #3: How Profitable Is Really This Niche!

Now this step is only to confirm if truly this niche is profitable. For this I will use another online keyword tool and Amazon.com. The keyword tool is Spyful.com.

First, I will start with Spyful.com and I will be looking to find for our potential niche a search result of at least 1500 searches a day for all keywords combined. Also, I’ll check to know how much advertisers are paying per clicks (PPC) for these keywords on Google Adwords.

As a general rule, if the cost/click hits anywhere between 50 cents and $3.00, it’s a good indicator that people are making money in this niche market. A pointer that you too can make some money in it!

So, let’s see what Spyful.com has for our keyword phrase:

Keyword research using Spyful.com

Please take note of the data I’ve highlighted. These are worth explaining.

1.    Monthly Searches – This shows the local and Global figures from world-wide traffic as indicated by Google searches in all countries. For our example the local search is 240 while global it is 480! Of course, these looks insignificant but remember, I’m looking for a search result of at least 1500 searches a day for all keywords combined! For this, simply scroll down the page and you will see another section for “Profitable Related Keywords.”

Spyful.com Related Keywords

You should add these together and then divide by 30 to get the daily results.

2.    Cost Per Click – This is an estimate of the clicks an advertiser should expect from his advert on average each day and the the advertiser will pay per each click. Of course, this is only an estimate but for you as a niche site builder, it is an indication of what you can earn from such ads!

3.    Click-Through Rate – This is Google’s estimation of the number of clicks an ad gets vs. the total impressions the ad receives. If an ad appears 100 times, and it gets 2 clicks, its CTR is 2%! This is another profitability indicator for you. Please take note of this.

4.    Ranking Difficulty – Ranking difficulty takes into account the strength of the domains, on-page signals like “keyword in title,” and the number of .gov and .edu domains. We will talk more about this later when we discuss keyword research.  For now we will let it be!

So, there you have the data laid out for you. Easy to assimilate and simple to understand! All you need to do is use your experience and decide if this niche is worth targeting.

From my experience this is indeed a profitable niche however, from the “Monthly Searches” and “Ranking Difficulty” it will take some extra work to make an impact in the search engines.

But then you may want to check out Amazon.com before making your final decision.

So, what do you do?

Simply go to Amazon.com and enter the phrase, “how do you stop snoring” without the quotes.

So, what do we have?

Below are some of the products on sale at Amazon.com for this niche. Please note the customer reviews. Understand that if the customer reviews are over 30 it is an indication of how popular a niche is and as you do know, the more popular, the more profitable!

(i) Brookstone Anti-Snore Pillow!

Stop Snoring on Amazon.com

 

(ii) SONA FDA-Cleared Anti-Snore and Mild Sleep Apnea Pillow

Amazon.com - Stop Snoring

 

(iii) Doctor'S Nightguard Advanced Comfort, 1 Box

amazon.com Anti Snore Products!

 

Take Away: This is indeed a simple way of finding good and profitable niche markets.  How long does this take. For me, 30minutes to 1 hour is enough. But if you have not mastered the process it may take you a little longer.  You may decide to go for paid research tools. That is fine!

When I started the Niche Site Duel 2.0 I decided to look into some of these paid tools. And so, because Pat Flynn recommended the Long Tail Pro keyword tool I went on to download the trial version and tried it out. I also downloaded the trial version of Market Samurai having heard of it for some time now.

Now, I must say there are all good for keyword research.  But from my experience, to really get the best from them, you need the information I’ve just given you in this post. I must confess, I simply love using the free tools I used in this post. Yes, they may take time but I have a better grip on what I’m doing!

So, that is for now. In our next post we will talk about keyword research. Watch out for that post. If you have not signed up for our free updates do so right now, it is simple and free to join – see the box below!

Over to you: I will be glad to hear your thoughts and if you truly enjoyed this post, remember to share it!

12 Comments
  1. Hey Chadrack,

    Again an informative and interesting article, I really love your posts as you always share your experience and experiments. That’s what makes your posts more authentic and real.

    • @Aasma,

      Thanks for the good words. I’m only trying my best to help the community and the best way to do that is share from my experience and not just what others are saying.

  2. Hi Chadrack,
    I love the way you delivered this content.

    I’ve already started implementing some of the tips you stated here, but you made some points here that I don’t know about.

    I’ll implement them

    Thanks

    Dan

    • @Daniel Adetunji,

      Yeah Dan, these are not new ideas. They are what most niche site experts use every time. Sharing them is so that those who are new to them can gain something useful and run with them! 🙂 And I’m glad that you have also gained something you can practicalize in your own way.

      Thanks for the comment.

  3. Very wonderful Chadrack,
    I really enjoyed the lecture and i agree with all you said here indeed. The only different between the premium tools and the free ones is the the premium ones only makes it faster, that’s all. The free ones are also good if you understand how to make use of them.

    Sincerely speaking, you’ve really shared a very handy post here and, i just bookmarked it for future reference.

    Thanks a lot for sharing.

    BTW: Check out my recent post.

    • @Theodore Nwangene,

      It’s really great that you love this post. I do this every time I want to build a new niche site. It’s a simple strategy that when used properly can become a gem. About paid and free tools, I totally agree that they make things faster especially if you want to do a whole lot of niche sites in a matter of time. I only mentioned these tools in the post because I’ve heard many talk about them as if it is these tools that does the work for you. If you have these tools but have no idea of the basics as I laid it out here, there will be problem using the tools.

      The Spyful.com tool I mentioned in the post also has a paid version but with the free version I think any one can get real good information for building niche sites.

      Thanks for the comment my man. Hope you are set to put up your niche site for the Niche Site Duel 2.0?

  4. Hi ChadRack,
    It’s really a wonderfull post I’m sure that it will help newbies because Newbies always get confused in knowing Niche- Thanks for sharing!

    • @Shan Naqvi,

      Frankly, this is good not only for newbies, Like i said in the post, if you really do not know this basic knowledge, you may struggle even if you have some great tool that you are using.

      Thanks for the comment.

  5. Hey Chadrack,

    Ah, I remember the day when I was building niche sites as well. I still have several up that are doing really well so I totally understand what you’re sharing here. They are in niches that obviously are popular enough that they are still making me plenty of sales but there isn’t a lot of competition in them.

    I know that the issue I had back then was providing information on these topics that I really didn’t know that much about. Boy, I sure do now! lol…

    Great outline Chadrack and I sure hope you’re doing really well with your sites. Or you see the potential for them so just hang in there.

    Thanks for this great post and a wonderful tutorial.

    ~Adrienne

    • @Adrienne,

      Thanks for this comment. Frankly, it came to me as a surprise that you are into building niche sites also! Yes, what you described is exactly the strategy I use – build them, optimize them for the search engines and then leave them to drive traffic on autopilot. This way you can build different sites in different niches and watch them pull some dough here and there! 🙂

      Of course, not all of them will do so well but all in all what comes from all can quickly turn to a torrent!

      For now, the few I have out there are really doing wonderfully. Google’s continuous algorithm changes is not helping the situation but we are learning to keep up with the changes!

  6. Great step-by-step tutorial Chadrack, and a perfect example of why pictures are worth a thousand words. Thanks for the effort…

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