Finding profitable niches can be difficult. Finding one that isn’t extremely saturated can be intimidating when you’re just starting out as an Internet marketer. The key to finding niches that are both profitable and have little competition is drilling down a top-level niche to find profitable sub-niches with fewer competitors.
For example, let’s say you’re interested in creating a site that has to do with beauty. You can drill the beauty category down into several different sub-categories. You could choose hair care, skin care, fitness, organic beauty, cosmetics, or any number of niches related to beauty.
But these categories are still too broad to be profitable with small numbers of visitors. You need to drill down further. Let’s say you decide to tackle the skin care demographic. Sub-categories of skin care might include eczema, acne, blackheads, wrinkles, age spots, psoriasis, and dry skin.
Now you have a list of smaller niches that you can begin to narrow down. Acne might still be too broad. You can drill down even more by targeting teenage acne, infant acne, and adult acne.
While you want to find niches that are narrow enough for you to dominate, you don’t want to choose niches that have too little traffic available. Don’t be afraid to spy on your competitors.
Go to your favorite search engine, like Google, and search for things like “how to get rid of acne.” This is obviously a niche desperately seeking a solution. If you drill down too much, like targeting “blackheads,” you might find it’s an annoyance, but maybe not something people are desperate enough to spend money solving.
You should verify that your idea gets a decent level of search volume by using a keyword tool like WordTracker or Google Keyword External. When you look for the niche on Google, see if there are plenty of AdWords ads on the right sidebar of the screen.
If so, this means people are making money in this niche. Any time you can come up with an original slant on an idea that’s already churning profits online, you’re poised for instant success.
If you rally want to get into the eBay niche, don’t go after a broad, eBay for beginners niche. Target something unique such as “eBay Businesses for Baby Boomers.” Pick a specific target audience and then cater to their needs instead of approaching the mass public with a broad idea.