How To Find Niche Markets For Your Website

How To Find Niche Markets For Your Website is a three part series that leads you through the steps of generating and evaluating niche ideas for your website.  In the first part of the series I will go over some of the fundamental considerations that you must understand.  In the second part of the series I will help you brainstorm niche ideas.  Finally, the third part of the series will show you how to evaluate your niche ideas and determine whether you can succeed in the market.

Finding a profitable niche for your online business is the most strategic decision you will make for your new venture.  All of your other decisions (website design, hosting, traffic generation, monetization approach) pale in comparison.  If you choose a market that has low demand, your site will never get traffic because no one is interested in your niche.  On the other hand, if you choose a market with strong demand, but intense competition, you risk being hard to find or irrelevant.  Lastly, if you choose a market that has the benefits of strong interest and weak competition, but no income potential – then you will have a highly visited website that doesn’t make any money.

If we ignore your passion for a particular niche (I’ll discuss that later), then the key to finding the best niche is to balance market demand, competition and income potential.  The following chart may help you visualize this.

How To Find Niche Markets – Fundamentals

Before you start brainstorming topics, doing keyword research and evaluating your competition, it is important to understand a few fundamental concepts.  Without getting too academic about consumer psychology…the basic driving forces behind market demand are: passions and problems.  Simply stated, consumers are most willing to take action (like making a purchase) when they have an extreme passion for a topic or an overwhelming problem to solve.  These two forces (passions and problems) are what compel a consumer to go looking for a solution that either feeds their passion or solves their problems.

When I discuss consumer passion, I am referring to a consumer that is fanatical about a specific niche.  Whether they are “Apple fanboys” or fantasy football addicts, this group of consumers has a strong emotional urge to know (or own) everything about a particular subject.  When learning how to find niche markets, you can never underestimate the power of passion.  If the passion is strong enough, the consumer will do almost anything to satisfy their desire – this is marketing gold.

Problems come in many forms.  The types of problems we are interested in are the ones where the consumer is suffering pain or overcome by fear – they are sufficiently motivated to do something.  Someone with the problem of “how do I clean up my dust bunnies” is not someone we are interested in helping.  We want people that need to pass an exam to get licensed or that are afraid of losing all of their digital pictures that are stored on their aging laptop.  We are looking for problems that worry someone enough for them to take action.  Anxiety and urgency will cause them to be actively looking for help.  Understanding this phenomenon is essential for you to learn how to find niche markets for your online business.

The final fundamental issue to consider is the available options that are available to a consumer to fuel their passion or solve their problems.  Your ideal niche will have very few recognized options for the consumer.  The consumer will be actively looking something that meets their needs, but can not find a great option.  Although I will expand on this topic in later articles, it is a fundamental tenet of dominating a chosen niche: you will need to provide a solution that a consumer feels is more valuable than other options.  Your unique proposition can be based on a better product, your expertise in the niche, or on superior marketing and service.  No matter what your angle, you will not have a sustainable advantage in a niche unless you offer something uniquely valuable.

For a video overview on how to find niche markets, checkout one of WordTracker’s tutorials.

In Part 2 of the How To Find Niche Markets series, I will examine how to find niche ideas.

In Part 3 of the series, I’ll teach you how to do Niche Research and understand your competition.