How To Find Your Online Niche. A Highly Profitable One In 6 Steps!

The most exciting way to build an online business is to choose something you’re passionate about, a hobby, or at least something you’re interested in. I couldn’t imagine working every day at something I didn’t enjoy writing about.

But is it profitable? That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? We want to make money with it after all. Let me show you how to find your online niche, a profitable one at that, in six easy steps.

Now I’m making the assumption you know what a niche is!? If you’re not quite sure, don’t worry. Here’s an article on the definition of a niche, to refresh your memory.

Coming up with a niche is the easy part, but you also want to understand it to be able to make it profitable. Finding out what your audience needs, wants, and desires are important things to learn ahead of time.

Do you want to know where you can build a business around your chosen niche? CLICK HERE

How To Find Your Online Niche In Six Easy Steps

This infographic is awesome, and I’ll explain more for you lower down, OK?

Thank you to NicheHacks for this infographic.

Let’s Break It Down Some More

Step #1 – Find A Specific Audience

Finding your niche, first and foremost, starts with you. Then you think of the audience. What interests you? What are you good at? What do others come to you for help? These are all great niche possibilities.

First, finding a niche.  Your niche can be your passion or something you want to become an expert in. This is what I did. I was very interested in online affiliate marketing, but still had a lot to learn. And boy, have I learned a lot over the years. And this was by doing research for the many articles I’ve written.

So once you’ve discovered what it is you want to build your business around, make it as specific as possible. Don’t choose something like “weight loss”. It’s too broad with too much competition. Narrow it down to something like “weight loss for diabetics”.

Second, your audience.   There are four questions to ask yourself about any audience:

1. Who are they? Diabetics
2. What do they want? To lose weight
3. What do they hate? Losing weight is too hard
4. Where do they hang out online? Social media, forums, etc.

Step #2 – Identify Your Audience’s Problems

Zeroing in on your audience’s problems will show you exactly how you can help them. The more specific the problem, the easier it will be for you to focus on the answer.

Unless you are a diabetic yourself, needing to lose weight, you may not know what these people are struggling with. But there are places you can look, online, to find out what they’re saying.

1. Product Reviews and Testimonials

Searching the already available products or blogs can give you some insight into what people are missing. For example, I did a quick Google search for “weight loss for diabetics with comments” and came up with lots of reading material. One blogging site called Diabetes Strong had an article on losing weight. I found three things immediately in the comments.

This first comment showed me that there isn’t much information online to help diabetics exercise and lose weight.

This comment (and I saw 2 more.) is asking why her weight gain in only on her lower stomach.

And finally, this comment showed me how I could build out my niche to include clothing.

2. Social Media Surveys

People with specific problems can usually find others in the same boat, on all types of social media platforms. Head over to Facebook, or Twitter, and look for someone who’s in the same niche as you.

On Facebook alone, there are oodles of photos, pages, links, groups, posts, and videos. By scrolling through the comments, you can pick up on the most active topics. Why not join in on some? Be the devil’s advocate and ask something controversial. You might get some great ideas for a more specific niche this way, lol.

3. Stalk Forums

This is one of the best ways to look for unique ideas. If you browse through a popular forum like Quora, you can find what people are asking the community. I personally use Quora a lot for research.

For example, when I typed in “Weight loss for diabetics” into the Quora search bar, take a look at some interesting questions that came up. Wow.

These three tips are some ways you can find out what your audience is most concerned about. This shows you their innermost concerns that they might not be finding answers to elsewhere. So this is where you can fill the gap!

Finding the needs, wants and desires of your audience is the first step. Coming up with a solution for them is the next step. And now that you know specific needs, coming up with solutions is easy. It may involve education, products, services, or all of them.

If your blog addresses the needs of your audience, you can create a very profitable business.  Now let’s see if there is a large enough market size.

Step #3 – Find Your Niche Market Size

Its no use finding a niche that no one is interested in. To be profitable, you need to have a large enough audience looking for answers.

This is where you need a keyword research tool. Personally, I use Jaaxy to do all my keyword research. If you don’t have access to one yet, you may want to try it out. There are several free tools online too, but they aren’t nearly as accurate.

First, you want to find the number of searches in the broader niche. You’re looking for searches of at least 10,000 per month. Let’s see what “Diabetes” is…

It’s over 300,000. That’s great. Now to be sure, let’s check out “Weight Loss”…

Over 200,000. Perfect! And notice that you have three great article ideas already. The three keywords with arrows beside them show low competition (QSR – Quoted Search Results) and great opportunity to be ranked (SEO – % out of 100 to be ranked on page one of Google)

So now we know that there are ample people searching for these terms each month, so you have a vast audience.  But is this audience growing?

Step #4 – Calculate Your Demand

It’s always good to see if the interest in your niche is growing or declining. And you can do this by using Google Trends.

• CLICK HERE for Google Trends
• in the search bar, type in your keyword. I typed in “Diabetes”
• choose your location (worldwide), time frame (past 12 months), and category (health)

If your business is global, which most online marketing businesses are, then choose “worldwide” for more accurate results. As you can see above, the keyword “diabetes” has grown slightly in interest over the last year. This is a good sign!

And when I typed in “diabetes and weight loss”, it still showed a slight increase. What you don’t want to see is a decline in interest. Keep in mind, though, that some declines may only be seasonal. If that’s the case, increase your date range.

Step #5 – Analyze Your Competition

A great way to check out how competitive your niche is, is to look at the average cost per click for advertising. Now, most new marketers won’t be using paid advertising for some time, as there’s a cost involved and many of us started out with no money, lol.

But this is still a good way to judge the competition. What you want to see is a lower average cost. If the click cost is high, then that means it very competitive.

Let’s use Google Ads, which is free. Creating your account is easy…as long as you use the link below. For some reason, it’s very difficult to access the Keyword Planner without setting up a campaign and leaving your credit card information. I found the link below when searching for an easy go-around.

• CLICK HERE to open Google Ads
• create your account by answering a few personal questions. (You can use a non-Gmail email)
• once inside your account, click on TOOLS, PLANNING, then KEYWORD PLANNER
• click on FIND NEW KEYWORDS and type in your keyword – enter
• when your list appears, filter your results by low competition to see if you have adequate choices.

As you can see in the picture above, this was the start of a long list of low competition keywords. So I think you’d be safe with this choice!

How do you think you will monetize your niche? With digital products? Or physical products? How about both?

You can visit affiliate networks to see if there are digital products you might like to promote. Here are a few:

• Clickbank
• JVZoo
• CJ Affiliate
• FlexOffers

For physical products, you can check sites like Amazon and eBay. When there, check to see what the reviews are like and if the products are worth your time. The last thing you want is to promote low-quality products. That will only hurt your reputation.

And finally, you can check out what’s currently popular on Alltop.com. (I know the infographic talks about Technorati.com, but that site is no longer available). Alltop takes the most popular sites and information in real-time.

This is another way to see if you have any competition that’s considered at the top. You might also find some great article ideas from the information listed.

But how can I possibly beat the top competition?

Step #6 – Defeat Your Competition

If you found a niche that you’re passionate about and find there’s a lot of competition, it doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t use it. You just need to find a way around the competition. Find something unique that no one else has thought of.

Contrary to popular belief, competition is actually a good thing! Competition means there’s a huge demand out there.

So…all you need to do is find a unique angle.

Check out your competitor’s website to see what traffic sources they don’t use. There are many ways to get traffic. Here are some of them:

• SEO
• Paid traffic (Adsense, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads etc.)
• Social Media
• Email marketing
• Guest Posting
• Blog commenting
• Interview Influencers
• Submit content to aggregator sites (Reddit etc.)
• Advertise on YouTube

Does your competition use all these methods?

Think about sub-niches you could find that your competition hasn’t. Previously, we were talking about diabetes and weight loss. How about narrowing it down some more and offer advice to diabetic men over 50 who have heart problems? Has anyone blogged about this yet?

Have you ever heard of Similarweb.com?

This is another great place to spy on your competition. Just input your competitor’s web address into the search bar and you’ll get a lot of interesting facts about them. My favourite feature is their traffic sources. This tells you where most of their traffic comes from, including social media sites.

Now that your armed with this information, you know where you can focus a new strategy to beat them.

In the infographic above, there’s mention of QuickSprout, Buzzsumo, and Moz. QuickSprout no longer has this tool, and the other two require a paid plan.

If you google “free competitor website analyzer tools”, you can find many more. For instance, I came across SE Ranking. It allowed me to input a competitor’s website and gave me some information to analyze. You can also sign up for a free trial with no credit card needed.

Final Thoughts

Learning what your audience needs is very important to your success. And so is discovering what your competition is doing. If you know a particular need and find out that no one else is addressing it, then you’re in a great position to get that particular traffic.

My hope is that these six steps to finding a great niche will help you on your way to building a successful online business. Your next steps will be choosing your domain name and building your website.

Can I recommend the best place for you to do this?

Any online business needs a solid foundation to be successful. That means learning how it’s done, from scratch. That way, you can move forward and repeat the process as often as you want. It’s the only way to create a passive income.

My recommendation is a platform that has all the training you need, as well as the tools (Jaaxy being one of them) and support to help you on your way. This platform can host up to 50 websites for you, at no additional cost. In fact, the price you pay includes everything and can’t be matched anywhere else online. You’ll save hundreds per month here.

This is where I built my business, and I’d love to see you here too. If you click the picture below, you can read about everything they offer.

When you join, I promise to be your personal coach as long as you need me. I’ll contact you immediately and help you get started. It’s so easy, you’ll love it!

Can’t wait to help you create your own passive income,

Suzanne