Welcome to Day 1 of my multi-week course on creating and selling your very own product online. I’ve talked a lot about affiliate marketing and how to get started and why I love it. I’ve even created a FREE training course and eBook around making money in affiliate marketing which you can check out more about here.

How to Find a Niche Market

There are a lot of affiliate marketers who make more than enough to live on in the 5 and 6 figure income range, but it’s the marketers who take that step into product creation who are the ones who are breaking into the 7 figure income level and beyond.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. Today I’m going to talk about step one, how to find a niche market to create a product for.

The other important thing to mention about this series is that it’s coinciding with my own product launch which I’ll talk about and refer to as this series goes along. The product itself is an informational product, an eBook on songwriting which I’ve titled “How to Write a Song – The ‘No BS’ Songwriter’s Bible”.

The reason I went with songwriting as my niche market is because it’s one of my passions and something which I pride myself on being able to do and do well at that. I’ve been doing it for 10 years now and have achieved some minor success as a musician, so I channeled all of that experience into this eBook.

Note that while my product is an informational product, most of what I’ll teach in this series can obviously be applied to any other kind of product whether it’s an informational product, some kind of software, or even a physical product.

Now let’s take that critical first step by talking about how to find a niche market to create a product for.

Brainstorming Product Ideas

Just like how I recommend you start out in affiliate marketing, I recommend that you focus on niches which you’re familiar with.

You likely have something which you’ve either received a specialized education in or you have a strong passion for. I had the idea for songwriting because it’s something which I can do and do well and felt confident that I could write a great deal of information on.

Take what you love then identify the biggest hurdle people have with it. Oftentimes, such as in my case, the problem will be learning whatever your subject is to begin with. With songwriting, the problem is that people don’t know how to get started, they try to do it but don’t like the quality of what they’re writing, or maybe they just have writer’s block. These are all things which I cover and solve in my eBook; I really wrote it to be the authority guide on songwriting (without the BS or covering things people already know or could figure out for themselves through common sense).

Identifying Market Demand

The quickest way to identify demand is to do none other than some good old fashioned keyword research. Yep, just check out my posts on what is a good keyword and how to do keyword research, grab your free copy of Market Samurai’s keyword tool, and start plugging in keywords related to your niche and check out what kinds of search volume those keywords are receiving each day to see if it’s worth your time.

Now you’re going to have to do as I say and not as I do here, because in reality I did not do any research beforehand. I was just eager to write a book on songwriting and didn’t check to make sure there was a market for it.

Fortunately I’ve since done some keyword research and there are a handful of terms getting decent levels of traffic each day, so I’ll be doing well if I can secure those search engine positions (fortunately I have a background in online marketing).

Don’t be too overwhelmed if when using Market Samurai you find a lot of competing web pages using the keywords you’re searching for in their title and other places. A lot of webmasters in these small niche markets don’t know the first thing about SEO and won’t be too difficult to overtake, so unless you’re dealing in the internet marketing or making money online niches, you have a decent chance at ranking.

Knowing how to find a niche market can pay off in spades. Take Earth4Energy, for example. This is an informational product which first launched about 5 years ago. It was once limited to an eBook but which has since blossomed and expanded to also include informational videos.

Still, this is an informational product nonetheless which costs about $50 and which educates you on how to build your own solar cells and windmills from the comfort of your own home and on a budget of roughly $100-$200 using everyday household materials.

Solar cells and windmills are very effective at generating renewable clean electricity to power your home and offset the cost of your electricity bill, potentially saving you a great deal of money each year.

The catch (which the Earth4Energy sales page will remind you of) is that to have these tools professionally built and installed would cost you several thousand dollars, and the appeal of being able to do it yourself very easily and on a budget is very enticing.

Couple that with the ongoing “current event” that our country has been more and more green energy conscious and obsessed in recent years; needless to say this informational product sold like hotcakes and even had a healthy number of imitators and spin offs in the weeks following its launch and success.

It’s still one of the affiliate network Clickbank’s all-time best-selling products and still generates a great deal of money today. Even I promoted this product when it first came out and made a few sales with it. The product consistently had a gravity well into the hundreds, and if you check out my post on what is Clickbank gravity, you’ll recognize that this basically meant that hundreds and just into the thousands of affiliates were making money selling this product.

This just goes to show you how profitable informational products can be and how well they sell if you can identify the right niche and have the right marketing strategy.

Of course there are a whole lot of fizzled out informational products, as well. Just take a look at the Clickbank marketplace and you’ll see dozens and hundreds of e-books and other digital products which haven’t generated any sales either because the niche had little demand (see picking a niche) or the products sales page was unattractive and not very compelling and persuasive.

Tomorrow we’ll get into the finer mechanics of actually how to create a product.