Today I’m going to show you how to find and validate your blog niche ideas, so open up a browser window, follow along, and by the end of this tutorial, you will have found your perfect niche.
Once you’ve found and validated a nice, you can launch a blog or start a blog or start an affiliate marketing business.
Why Choose A Niche?
Why do we need to find a niche in the first place?
Well, if you try to sell to everyone, or if your blog or your website is trying to appeal to everyone, it just ends up appealing to no one.
So if we want to succeed on the internet, we need to niche down and know specifically who we’re speaking to. And we need to know specifically what type of problems we’re going to solve for them.
Now, if you think about how people might find your blog, you’ll know where to position it.
And chances are they’re going to use Google, right?
They’re going to search, or they’re going to click a link on social media, or they’re going to be referred to you by a friend.
So for those reasons, you have to know the conversation that’s going on inside their head, and then you have to position yourself in the right place.
When they seek an answer to that problem that they’re facing, then boom, you’re there with the help they need.
I think Eben Pagan said it best; niches are needs. He’s right.
Find A Profitable Niche
So how do you find a profitable niche? Well, we’ve really got three big industries where there’s a lot of profit.
The first one is wealth. So finance, financial information.
The second one is health, weight loss, diets, etc.
Then sex is the third one. So things like dating, information for divorcees.
If you can think of an area that you’re interested in or you feel passionate about in one of these three big industries, you’re a lot closer to finding your perfect niche.
Hobby Niche Blogs
However, I know that not everyone is going to have a particular interest in one of those big industries. So what I want you to do is choose a hobby.
Hobbies are also big money industries on the internet. If we combine that into the mix, now we’ve got four big areas to start looking.
So in all, wealth, health, sex, and hobbies are good starting points.
Use Amazon To Find Blog Niche Ideas
You can follow along with the video version of this tutorial if you want to, I’ll be referencing that throughout the rest of this post.
So let’s start and open up a new tab on your browser window.
We’re going to go to Amazon.
Have a look at your ‘recently viewed’ items, have a look at what Amazon thinks you’re going to enjoy. Have a look at what it’s suggesting to you, because the thing with big companies; they sometimes know us better than we know ourselves.
Amazon monitors our surfing history, they track everything we do. And okay, that can be a bit scary to some people, but it can be really useful too.
What I want you to do is have a look through everything you’ve purchased on Amazon, have a look at the products you’ve bought, have a look at the Kindle books you’ve bought.
What you’re doing here is a discovery phase before you narrow down into your niche.
Make a list of the products you’ve bought that fall into the big four categories; wealth, health, sex, and hobbies.
As you’ll see in the video, Amazon has recommended a marketing book for me. So marketing could be one of my interests, which falls into the wealth industry.
It also suggested an audio cable, so I might look at my hobbies.
And what I want you to do is go through your purchase history and the things that Amazon suggests to you, and make a list of all the topics.
Also have a look at your bookshelf, have a look at the magazines that you read. What you’re doing here is discovering potential ideas before you really drill down and find that specific perfect niche for you.
So, because I’m obviously a digital marketer, and I’ve done this for more than 20 years, I’m just going to go with marketing as an example.
Use Google To Find Your niche
I’ll give you a couple of examples on how to do this.
Now let’s go back to Google, and sure we can type in ‘marketing’ – and yep that’s a big industry. So no matter which one you have chosen, or you’re working with at the moment, what we need to do is validate if it’s a profitable idea.
We need to really drill down and get absolutely like laser targeted specific with this stuff. So I’ve chosen marketing, which we know is going to be a profitable niche to get involved with, but you can’t just enter into marketing.
Like the competition is just crazy high, right?
What you need to do is half the niche. So you drill down, you break it in half.
It looks like we’ve got lots of different topics and ideas inside marketing, but what I want you to do is think about who it’s for.
A really simple way of halving the size of a niche, because the more specific you get, the more revenue you will make, the easier it is to compete.
So you could slice it by gender.
That’s a really fast way of doing it. So it could be marketing for men, or marketing for women, and you see a lot of ‘wanna-preneurs’, like a ‘mompreneur’. That stuff does grind on me a little bit, because I’m not that keen on that whatever-preneur, but it is a way of halving the niche.
So these people are targeting on, they’re providing entrepreneurial advice for a specific gender.
You could try the same thing in your market and half it that way, but then you can half it again and get more specific. The more specific you become, the easier it’s going to be to generate revenue.
So you could look at the situation that you’re in right now, or the situation that you have come from that could be even better.
Let’s use my son as an example.
He’s learning how to play guitar at the moment so let’s take a look at the guitar niche.
You need to know specifically who your customers will be, or your sub-niche.
A good way to do sub-niche discovery is to just type in a few words into Google and see what the drop down suggestions are.
Here it’s going to give you other niches that you can drill down into.
So maybe we can go for ‘acoustic guitar lessons’.
And then, once you have an idea of the niche, you cut it in half, and then in half again. Now you’ve got down to very specific group of people who you will serve.
Validating Your Niche With Google
So my sub-niche is now people who want to start learning to play acoustic guitar.
But we need to check that ads are being sold for these specific keywords. So we’re going to go with ‘guitar lessons for beginners acoustic’ as our main keywords.
So here we can see that this is an ad someone’s paying to display a link to their website at the very top of Google. The second position there, that’s an another ad for these keywords, and a third ad.
This tells us that this niche is profitable, because if it’s not profitable, people are not going to pay to advertise there.
Validate Your Niche With Amazon
So let’s go back to Amazon, and we’re just going to validate the niche for a second time.
So go back to Amazon, paste in the keywords in the search bar.
And what we want to see are information products being made for this niche.
Look for things like DVD’s, magazines and books. In particular, looks for The Dummies Guide books.
If information products are being made and sold it means there’s buyers in this niche. And a good way to see if there are real buyers, is to have a look at the number of reviews.
In my example, I’ve chosen a very lucrative niche, which is acoustic guitar.
Now we’ve validated that there’s information products being made and sold on Amazon, so there’s a clear demand for that type of content in your chosen niche.
Validate Your Niche With ClickBank
We’re going to validate things one more time.
This time we’re going to check a website called ClickBank and we’re going to go to their marketplace.
What we’re going to do here is validate that digital products are being sold.
That’s really important, because we’ve seen that physical products are being sold, so people can buy DVDs, they can buy books, brilliant, but we want to make sure that people are actually downloading digital content too, because I want you to have as many options as possible.
The more income streams you have the stronger your business will grow.
So on ClickBank.com head over to the Affiliate Marketplace and we can put in the keywords and see what it brings back.
It will show you if digital products are being made in your chosen niche.
But that’s not enough because we want to pay attention to what the product is, how much it’s being sold for, and if it’s selling.
You can see if it’s selling by looking at the ‘gravity’ and the ‘average dollar per sale’.
The gravity tells us that in the last 30 days, affiliates are making sales on a product. Gravity can be manipulated and it’s not a strong indicator of how well a product is really performing, only that it is selling.
For that reason, we only need to see a gravity of 0.1%.
So in all, now you know how to validate if a niche is a lucrative one.
Now we now we know that people are paying for advertising space on Google, so they can get traffic to their offers.
We’re validated that physical products are being made and sold on Amazon. We have validate that they’re being sold by looking at the number of reviews.
And then we validated it a third way by checking that digital products are being sold and they’re actually selling. If affiliates are promoting those products, you can be sure there’s money in the niche.
Why Choosing A Passion Is Smart
So once you’ve got all these pieces in place, and everything’s given you a big check, that’s the niche you go with.
And I would encourage you to choose something that you do feel passionate about, because I know a lot of people come into this thing and they think, “well, I’ll just go where I know the money is”.
So they’ll be tempted to choose either weight loss or choose one of the financial niches, but don’t know anything about it.
That’s the wrong way to do it, because while you don’t have to be an expert, in any niche you do have to have at least a good understanding of it.
You don’t have to be world-class or anything like that, but you have to have that passion, that interest.
Why do you need to choose a passion or interest?
Because no matter what you’re doing on the internet, you have to build an audience. And you’re going to receive questions from people.
They’re going to ask you your opinion on things, and you need to have at least a basic understanding of things in your niche to be able to give them an accurate and honest answer.
That’s why we choose a passion so we can serve the audience better.
Why It’s Better For Your Audience
Even if you turn to Google and start copying and pasting bad information from untrustworthy, unreliable sources, it’s not the smartest thing to do.
And how would you know if they’re untrustworthy or unreliable, because you don’t know the niche?
So that’s why we choose a passion that we have some kind of interest in.
And when we do that, the people that we’re connecting with, our potential customers, our audience, these are the people that we would naturally get along with anyway, because we have that shared interest.
So it becomes less like you’re trying to sell to people. Instead it feels like we’re just making recommendations or providing helpful stuff to people that we would naturally become friends with anyway.
And I know in my other businesses, through this approach, I’ve made really good friends. A lot of the customers that come into my funnel, they come in as complete strangers, but over the course of being involved in my Facebook group, and on the blogs, and interacting with me, I get to know them.
They get to know me and we develop a friendship. And it doesn’t feel like work.
And that’s what I want for you too.
I want you to find a niche that you wake up every day, and you think, “hey, I love what I do”. Creating content like this is a real buzz for me, and that’s what I get every single morning, I wake up in bed, and I think I can’t wait to get started. It’s not work. It doesn’t feel like work.
And that’s because I’ve chosen the right niche for me. Something that I feel immensely passionate about.