Finding a niche without using any paid tools

I start my day by reading a few Internet Marketing forums. One of the most commonly asked question on these forums is about finding a niche. There are tons of answers to that question in the forums but majority of them offer little insight on what they are doing really. You will usually find something like this:

• Check trends
• Go through UberSuggest or a similar tool to generate some ideas
• Pick a few keywords
• Check traffic for your keywords
• Check competition
• Check search volume
• Check CPC
• Check first results on the first page to see if there are some week websites in there.

The problem with this method is that there is hardly any purpose to it. You can’t follow this method unless you know exactly what the person suggesting these steps was trying to achieve by finding a niche. Was he trying to sell ClickBank products? Was he trying to make money with Adsense? Was he simply building an authority site? And so on…

So many questions remain unanswered.

Since I’m going to build an authority site, I will show you how to find a profitable niche for that only. If you are looking to build smaller niche sites or something else, you will have to put your own spin on what I teach you in this article.

The PURPOSE of this guide is to find a niche where I can build an authority site and make $100/day within 8 months.

Find a market that spends money

The foremost thing you need to do is to find a market that spends money. You don’t want to end up with a great niche where you can rank your site in days but no one is interested in buying anything in that market. You want visitors who are potential buyers. Keeping that in mind, we begin looking for a market with huge spendings.

To start your search, you can simply use the list of websites below to get some ideas.

• Nichebot
• Shopping.com
• AOL Hot Searches
• Google Groups
• Craig’s List
• Delicious Popular
• Dig
• Google Catalogs
• Google Suggest
• Technorati

To find markets that spend money, you can simply do the following.

• Visit http://pulse.ebay.com/. This is a great place to find hot products. You can easily find out markets that are spending money.
• Visit Amazon and look at their hot selling items.
• Check the largest stores to see what they are selling. This will give you an idea about what people are buying. These large stores won’t be selling if no one is buying. So if every large store has electronic products, it simply means a lot of people are buying them.

Once you have identified the markets that spend money, make a list of them and move to the next step.

Pick an evergreen niche

This is common sense. You don’t want to pick a niche/market that is seasonal. Since I will be building an authority site and will be finding a niche for that through this tutorial, I would only look at markets that sell round the year.

Think of weight loss, beauty products, dating and so on. People are always going to want to lose weight, buy beauty products and go dating. These are examples of evergreen niches/markets where you will make money even 10 years from today.

Determine profitability and competition

Once you have identified a few niches that you think generate a lot of sales, you can simply use this free keyword tool to check the number of people searching for it. Once you enter your niche/keywords in this tool, it will show you various matching keywords with number of searches for each of them. A keyword with more than 5,000 monthly searches is something you want to add to your final list.

Another way to check profitability is to check search volume in Google. You can simply perform some targeted searches in Google and find out search volume for your keywords. This can give you an idea of popularity of the keyword/niche and therefore make an idea about profitability.

For checking competition, I simply used Google Adwords. It’s a great tool and it’s free. It gives you nearly accurate estimates of competition and profitability of a niche. Simply search for your keywords and see the CPC and competition. You’d ideally want to go for niches/markets with HIGH competition since that means there would be a lot of advertisers willing to spend to show their ads. If I end up building a valuable authority site, I can get a higher CPC (Cost Per Click) which means more money from clicks.

Visit forums and find out more about your niche

By now you should have picked your niche. I did.

You should be visiting forums and exploring your niche now. This is the time to determine behavior of your potential customers, understand their purchasing habits and see what they want. You will be offering them what they want through your website. Forums are a great place to see what people are talking about.

You can easily find forums for your niche by searching [forum+your niche]. You can also search for [intitle:forum+niche] and [inurl:forum + niche]. Both queries should give you enough results to dig through your niche.

Make sure that you are recording all the information you get by visiting these forums. Make note of questions that people are asking and things that people are talking about within your niche. All this will help us build a site for our audience and not for ourself.

The post Finding a niche without using any paid tools appeared first on Asif Mumtaz.