Before you dive into a new niche, regardless of whether you’re doing long term marketing or short term marketing, you’re going to want to know if it’s worth your time. Are there products there to promote in that niche? Are they worth promoting? Are people spending money in this niche? These are just a handful of questions you might ask, so let’s get into how to pick a niche and test it.
How to Pick a Niche
First and on a very quick and basic level, you can do a quick Google search for a term relevant to that niche and take a look at your paid results.
If there are a lot of Adwords ads appearing which are extremely relevant to your keyword search then that tells us that people are willing to spend good money to get their ads shown for that niche and there is likely money to be made in doing so. Commerciality is absolutely necessary in the process of how to pick a niche.
Secondly, you can use OfferVault.com to do a search for affiliate offers and products which are relevant to your niche/keywords. Obviously if a niche/keyword has little or no products to promote on OfferVault which does a mass search across hundreds of affiliate networks, then that’s evidence that that particular niche will not be worth our time.
Also, you can use a tool like Market Samurai which can show you information about a niche based on its keywords and specific Adwords figures.
With Market Samurai, you can learn how competitive that niche is, how many advertisers are bidding on keywords in that niche as opposed to every other niche, and even get an estimation of the kind of money which you can make by ranking number one for a keyword relevant to that niche.
You can even get data like the OCI which measures the number of people searching for a keyword who are looking to make a purchase as opposed to just looking for information on it.
Besides using a little intuition and common sense, these methods all save you time from having to test a niche yourself first hand.
Sometimes, however, I’ll find that no matter how much testing I do in how to pick a niche, I still can’t truly tell if a niche is worth my time until I roll up my sleeves a bit and dive right in by picking the best looking product from that niche, throwing up a quick web page, and then seeing how it converts with some quick traffic sent to it.
You can either use a generic domain and set up a new subdomain every time you test a new niche or you can also register a new .INFO domain at GoDaddy for $0.99 so that you can get a URL which relates to the niche.
The latter is typically preferable as most people visiting your site would prefer reading a dog collar review on “DOGCOLLARREVIEWS.INFO” as opposed to something generic like “REALLYGREATPRODUCTS.COM” despite the greater quality associated with a .COM over a .INFO.
Once I get my URL sorted out I’ll then throw up a quick landing page to showcase a product of my choosing from that niche.
You can of course use any type of landing page. I personally typically like a quick review of the product, emphasizing the finer points of it. I even have a template which I typically stick to in terms of the page so I can take an existing review and just swap out the copy for the new niche/product.
Once the page is up I’ll either send some paid traffic its way or write some articles on it, two sources of quick targeted traffic to gauge how well it performs and converts.
Over time if I’m pleased with the amount of sales I’m making based on however much traffic I’ve sent towards that page, then I’ll continue with that method or perhaps register a unique .COM for it and continue promoting that niche, taking the time to find a number of worthwhile keywords associated with that niche.
It sounds like a lot of work but it’s really not when you get it down to a science and have a specific landing page ready to reuse time and time again, simply swapping out one niche/offer/keywords for another.
More importantly, this all can be well worth your time as I’ll routinely still make a sale on a niche which I did this method for over a year ago and haven’t touched since which, in case you were unsure, feels pretty awesome.
While this method typically is more useful for just getting your feet wet in a new niche for short term marketing, if you test a number of niches and eventually come upon one which is earning you good money but which you also enjoy writing about, you can think about expanding upon that site and start spending some time regularly developing it into an authority site.
You can use these tips for choosing a niche for designing your own product, as well, so refer to this post on how to create a product for the beginnings of my complete guide on everything to know about product creation.