Finding a Profitable Niche Seems to be the Most Difficult Part!

That is exactly what John, one of my NuttieZine subscribers wrote while signing up for my newsletter! Okay John, allow me to make your "most difficult" easy (and here is hoping everyone else reading this article is equally benefited)! ;)

Here are some niche suggestions for you from ClickBank (not that you necessarily need to sell Clickbank products):

1. Health and Fitness:
http://www.clickbank.com/mkplSearchResult.htm?mainCategoryId=1347&sortField=POPULARITY&b1=1347&catFromNav=true

2. Home and Family:
http://www.clickbank.com/mkplSearchResult.htm?mainCategoryId=1366&sortField=POPULARITY&b1=1366&catFromNav=true

3. Computing and Internet:
http://www.clickbank.com/mkplSearchResult.htm?mainCategoryId=1283&sortField=POPULARITY&b1=1283&catFromNav=true

4. Money and Employment:
http://www.clickbank.com/mkplSearchResult.htm?mainCategoryId=1332&sortField=POPULARITY&b1=1332&catFromNav=true

5. Sports and Recreation:

http://www.clickbank.com/mkplSearchResult.htm?mainCategoryId=1472&sortField=POPULARITY&b1=1472&catFromNav=true

6. Business to Business:
http://www.clickbank.com/mkplSearchResult.htm?mainCategoryId=1266&sortField=POPULARITY&b1=1266&catFromNav=true

7. Society and Culture:
http://www.clickbank.com/mkplSearchResult.htm?mainCategoryId=1461&sortField=POPULARITY&b1=1461&catFromNav=true

So there you go, 7 broad niche suggestions, with links that would take you to the "hot" products selling in those niches respectively.

Of these, I think the first five are the best pick. People have problems with their health and computers all the time (I know I have). Home and family is also a niche where you can find lots of buyers. The economy is going through a rough patch so people are looking for a part-time or full time income (especially those who are losing jobs); so "money and employment" this is yet another niche you can dive in!

If you are promoting Clickbank products however (you don’t need to, as I already said), you would not want to promote anything related to "internet marketing" (the reason why I excluded the "Marketing and Ads" category of Clickbank from my list, although some Forex products that also fall in that category are good to promote) because the refund rate with these products is pretty high, at least with Clickbank, due to their "easy refund policy"! :)

Now I am not asking you to start marketing in these ultra-competitive mainstream niches without dominating the sub-niches first; that would be stupid! When you are served hot food, do you eat from the middle or the side of the plate? If you eat from the middle, you would burn your fingers, but since the side cools off quicker, you can eat from the side without burning fingers! That is pretty much the method you need to use in niche marketing!

Let me give you another analogy. In good old days when we had kings, queens and warfare, the wise generals would attack the enemy’s army from the sides rather than from front side. Doing it thus, they could win against the enemy even with a smaller army strength! Cutting an enemy from the sides disables him quicker than attacking him from front :)

Let us take the acne niche for example. Say, you are new to it and know nothing about the niche! Would you just pop up an ebook on "how to get rid of acne", sit on your a**  and expect lots of sales coming in from Clickbank? Not at all!

See, acne has several sub niches which you need to dominate first before going mainstream (you can dominate them either as a product creator or as an affiliate marketer, though starting off as an affiliate marketer would be a better choice) . You can use Google sets to get these sub-niche suggestions (there are other tools I mentioned years ago at my "Easy Niche Research Recipe" article; notice that I have not changed a bit over the years ;) )

So, I go to Google Sets and typed in the keyword "acne" (I chose "Large Set") and I got these keywords:

acne
dryness
oiliness
sunburn
hyperpigmentation
cellulite
rosacea
eczema
asthma
cough
diarrhea
pinkeye
psoriasis
stretch marks
scars
age spots
all causes
gout
mumps
rabies
fever
abdominal pain
depression
eating disorders
coughs
headaches
constipation
bronchitis
headache
sore throat
enlarged pores
fatigue
hearing
back pain
arthritis
seeing
exercise
tasting
keeping clean
chickenpox
earaches
myiasis

Now, of course there are some "false positives" in this keyword set that you need to weed out, so that we are left with:

acne
dryness
oiliness
sunburn
hyperpigmentation
rosacea
eczema
diarrhea
pinkeye
psoriasis
stretch marks
scars
rabies
eating disorders
constipation
enlarged pores
keeping clean
chickenpox
earaches
myiasis

Now I am not a dermatologist, but this much I know that acne and such other skin diseases are (to a large extent) a by-product of digestion problems and living in dirty surroundings. I also know that keeping your home clean is one of the surefire ways to minimize skin diseases.  Hence I have not removed keywords like "eating disorders",  "diarrhea" and " keeping clean " from my keyword list. You may however exclude them if you like ;)

Keep a dictionary handy to help you with medical terms! ;)

The next things you would want to do are:

a) Pick up one of these "sub-niches"

b) Do keyword search using Google Keywords tool

c) Pick up the "money keywords" or "buyer keywords"

d) Leave the "freebie seeking" and other useless keywords. Also remove keywords with no available search data!

e) Build your site around your chosen keywords.

Now, what type of content should your site have? Well, you can fill it up with either ‘product reviews" or general "informative articles", but I prefer to do both. That way, you instantly build credibility in the eyes of the prospective buyer (through your informative articles) as well as make some money (from your product reviews)!

Product reviews need to be honest reviews. People, including me, are sick and tired of biased affiliate reviews that have polluted Google’s search database. I am sure your reaction to these reviews is no different. When someone buys a product on your recommendation and it happens to be a mediocre product, do you think he is going to build a temple for you and worship you, or tell others not to visit your site because your reviews are not accurate! ;)

You would follow all these steps for the other sub-niches too. Once you have completely dominated all the sub-niches, you can buy a generic domain name or one containing a "top keyword" related to the mainstream niche, and use it to tie all the sub-niche sites together (thus, this site would be your mother site for the respective niche)! ;)

Note that your mother site won’t benefit much from this "inter-linking"; it is just a way of tying things together for improving the visitor’s experience and making them stick around longer. Don’t expect this "onsite seo optimization method" to boost your traffic level. To bring traffic, you need to build traffic.

Traffic generation is indeed the major problem for so many marketers (and hence it is also a niche you can make  a lot of money from, hee hee :D).

There are two main ways to bring traffic:

a) Free SEO method  

b) Paid traffic, consisting of PPC, banner ads, text ads, or any other paid methods you may know of!

I prefer the "free method" because I am very stingy, and also because I don’t want to watch my PPC stats like a hawk with bated breath and a fast-beating heart throughout the day! One another advantage of organic seo traffic over PPC is that while in case of PPC you cannot bid for "trademarked" keywords, you can surely write articles around that keyword and get Google love (and that too for free ) ;)

So let me discuss the free method. In fact, I have already discussed it here so here I will give only a short synopsis.

I mainly submit free softwares through Promosoft (I am not a programmer, and you don’t need to be one either to do this), Angela’s and Paul’s backlinks packets, and article marketing! I divide my efforts among them in the following manner:

I Devote 55% of My Efforts to Backlink Building
I Devote 40% of My Efforts to Freeware Submission
I Devote only 5% of My Efforts to Article Marketing

I can give you several reasons why I am not that interested in article marketing:

a) Ezinearticles, the "premium article directory" takes a long time to approve articles (unless you are a paid member, but then again, I am not sure about the speed of approval with their paid membership because I have never upgraded my free account). I have found that writing articles and getting them approved by Ezinearticles takes me longer than the time it takes to put the backlinks of Angela’s packets!

b) The prospect of having your articles published all over the web sounds good in theory, but do you know how many of these publishers are actually giving you proper credit by leaving your resource box intact, and how many more are tampering with it?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend hours on Google alerts, looking for who copied my article without giving me proper credit, not to mention the amount of time I would have to spend to actually shut down those content thieves!

c) Even if all publishers give you proper credit, there is no guarantee that every site your article is published on is a high pagerank, authority site. In fact, many of these sites are actually cr*ppy WordPress blogs which thrive on RSS-fed content from article directories, and Adsense!

With Angela’s and Paul’s backlinks, you are in better control of your fate! I don’t do freeware submission for backlinks of course; I do it mainly for short-term traffic! But I have found that over time this freeware submission method also boosts the long term traffic and pagerank of my site (note that these days several freeware directories use nofollow so you will get backlink credit from very few of them, if at all)!

This is just what I do; I am not saying that THIS IS the right way to do things. If you have success with any other method, you are free to use that! I would be only too happy if not many people copy my traffic generation methods! :D

Anyway, as you can see, finding a niche is easier than you thought. If you want more step-by-step guidance, Confessions of a Lazy Super Affiliate and VIP Conduit Method are the only two ebooks I would suggest!

Some other facts:

People are and will always be greedy for money ("make money" niche)

People are and will always continue to date sexy ladies, no matter how many times they are heartbroken ("dating" niche)

People are and will always try to improve themselves and their lifestyle through mediation, spirituality, etc ("self help" niche)

People are and will always be worried about and invest in their health ("health and fitness" niche)

No matter how poor they might be, people will continue to invest in beautifying their homes and lawns ("home and garden" niche)

Family problems are only going to become worse over time ("family" niche)

Parenting is difficult, is not it? Any parent knows that, and they are always on the lookout for tips and advice ("parenting" niche)

Here is another "fact": Nuttie Guru will always continue to write long boring articles like this, because he likes to make people bored ;)

Speaking of site building, I won’t recommend using WordPress, unless you know how to tweak it well, that is! It is good as a CMS platform but not great for conversions and sales. For "money sites", I prefer to build plain HTML sites using Dreamweaver.

Of course, CMS is far better than plain HTML sites because CMS makes your life easier, but trust me, WordPress is not made for affiliate marketing! I cannot speak for any other CMS softwares, but WP is so cumbersome and bloated that to be honest, I have really started hating it. I know that reading it on a WordPress blog sounds funny to you, but I have already started looking for prospective CMS solutions (paid is okay too).

In fact, I even liked a couple of them, but neither of them could give me the assurance that the content I export from WordPress in XML format would be imported smoothly in their CMS. What I am really worried about is the loss of so many articles; they amount to almost 5-6 MB in total!

BTW, personally I have taken a long break from niche marketing for a while. I am happy serving the people of "make money" niche for now; it is one niche I really love to be in and know something about! :)

Another question I got from a subscriber is: "If everyone is marketing in a ‘hot’ niche, then how can I make money from it?" Quite a pertinent question but I am leaving it for the next article. If she does not want to wait then she can read my older article where this question has been answered already! ;)
 
This article has become long and boring enough, so please excuse me now and I will be back to bore you again on next Saturday! Please, if you be so kind, please post a nice comment below describing your feelings after reading this article! :D

Neither Fidgeting with Niche Research
Nor Spending Hours on Keyword Tools
But only Action and Right Action alone,
Will Make You REAL Money! ;)