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.