For many beginning internet marketers, finding niche markets is the hardest part.

It’s easy to get stuck with the question what is the best niche market, and then never progress any further into the world of internet marketing. Many people spend weeks looking at different market niches, being undecided and trying to do more research.

If this is your very first start in internet marketing you probably really want to get this right and you end up being paralysed by all the options. You might even find yourself doing niche market research for weeks yet feeling undecided.

Well, let me tell you something: To identify niche markets should only take you a few minutes. An hour max. Once you’ve decided on a market you can spend a little bit of time researching the people in the market and their problems, and finally deciding on an offer you’d like to promote (or even creating a product yourself).

The number one criteria for finding your niche market should be this question:

Are other people already making money in this market?

If the answer is yes, you can jump straight in and do your research for this niche market.

The reality is even if the market doesn’t work for you and turns out to be a dud, you might not be able to recoup the cost of your website and traffic generation efforts, but it would be even harder for you to get the 4 weeks back you could have otherwise spent on market research.

Here are some simple ideas to get you started to find a niche within 5 minutes:

• What do people spend money on? (Tip: Think about what you’ve recently spend money on!)
• What are people’s goals? (Tip: Think about what your goals are… get fit, earn more money, travel, etc)
• See what already sells (Tip: Look on Amazon, Ebay, Clickbank, etc they all have a list of best sellers)

I hope this helps you get your ideas opportunities rolling!

Once you have found a niche, check out my post on how to research a niche market in 5 easy steps and how to research your niche market using Survey Monkey.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to add them below.

Many beginning internet marketers are a little bit confused about the difference between keyword research versus market research.

Your market research indicates whether you’ve found a ‘hot’ market or niche. This means a group of people who are interested in a particular topic and are willing to spend money on products or services relating to this topic.

Your keyword research then indicates which exact words people are using to find information in this niche. For your keyword research you should consider things like SEO competition, how many searches a keyword gets, how much traffic a website would get from these searches, etc.

Your research should look something like this:

Market Research
1. Find niche markets
2. Determine whether it is a ‘hot’ niche market (Tip: If other people are making money in this niche, it should be possible for you too!
3. Find offers in this niche market
4. Plan how to enter the niche market (blog, squeeze page, PPC, SEO, etc)

Keyword Research

5. Do some broad keyword research (also called lateral keyword research)
6. Swipe your competitors keywords
7. Analyse each keyword (including number of searches, SEO competition, PPC cost, commercial intent, etc)
8. Decide on your primary and related keywords for each of your online assets (blog posts, articles, squeeze page, etc)

I will be posting in more detail about each of these steps in the near future. In the meantime, please leave comments or questions below.

You have found a hot niche – lots of searches and traffic – now you need to find out what to sell them. Here are 5 ways how to research a niche and find out what people really want.

Create a Survey

Start a Survey Monkey survey. It offers a free version. If you’re not sure what to write in your survey, check out my recent video on how to create a survey.

Now you need to direct traffic to your survey, so you can get as many people as possible to answer your questions. Here are some tips how to do this:

• Post a link to your survey in forums (some forums have sections for media research that get a particularly good response rate)
• Email your survey link to your database. If you don’t have a database yet, send it to friends and family who fit into your niche.
• Post a link to your survey on relevant facebook groups

Forums

There are forums for just about every single niche market you can imagine -from “underwater wrestling” to “how-do-you-know-if-you’re-a-Vampire”. You can usually browse these forums, without needing to register. It’s called lurking.

This way you can find out what problems and frustrations your potential customers have, and whether they actually spend money on this niche. When researching a niche, I saw someone posting “I buy every book I can find about [XYZ].” That’s when I knew that I had a market that would buy my product.

Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is a fantastic tool to research what your market wants. Why? Because people actually go there to ask questions! Browse or search your niche topic and see how many questions are being asked, what kind of questions they are and what kind of responses people post.

Hardcopy books

Print books are an amazing research tool for you. Publishing a book normally costs thousands of dollars and the publishers want to make sure they meet market demands as much as possible. You can either go to the book store and scan the index pages of books in your niche, or you can go to Amazon and use the ‘Look Inside’ function, to browse through the index, foreword and cover of the books.

Magazines

Like the book industry, magazine publishing is also a million dollar industry. To make sure readers keep buying, the editors and publishers of the magazines do constant market research. They also need to determine what the market wants.

You can either browse the shelves at your local newsagency (newsagencies near airports and train stations usually have the biggest selection), or browse online subscription services (such as www.magazines.com) to see what magazines are available. If magazines continually cover the same topic (something like ‘Get a bikini body for summer’), you have found a great angle for your niche market.

Which methods do you use to research niche markets? Leave your comment and share your experiences.

I had the pleasure of spending 3 amazing days with successful internet marketers James Schramko, Peter Parks and Kyle Tully, and all three of them emphasised a very basic technique – Survey your Market, Survey your Customers!

By asking your market and existing customers what they want and need, you can give them exactly what they want and need. Simple!

So, I recorded a step-by-step video of how you can start your own survey online. The easiest way is to get started with a free account, for example with Survey Monkey.

If you enjoyed the video, please leave your comment below and take 2 minutes to fill out my survey for beginning internet marketers.