Niche Research Manifesto – Part 1
Niche Research Manifesto – Part 2
Niche Research Manifesto – Part 3
Other Sources of Niche Ideas
While dedicated tools and even the Google search engine itself are powerful ways to generate ideas for your niche, there are other resources you can leverage:
Yahoo Answers
This is usually a great way to see what questions people are asking. This can give you an idea of what some of your prospects want in your niche.
This information can be used to craft sales messages to be able to sell them products and make a profit. This is what a money-making niche website is all about.
Amazon.com
Amazon has been around for a long time – for a good reason – they know a lot about sorting products by price and quality. With the addition of customer reviews, they usually give a good look at products in any niche.
Look at the table of contents for various info-products in your niche. This will give you ideas on what are some of the sub-themes you can target.
Look at the customer reviews. Focus especially on the negative ones (1-2 stars). Those usually reveal unmet needs and opportunities for you to come in.
Read Merchant Sales Letters
By looking at how your competitors sell to prospects, you are going to know what’s working. As with other sources, keep a spreadsheet of the data so similarities can be noted. You want the best of the best techniques.
Pay careful attention to the Clickbank marketplace, because many sales letters have all the right elements. Also, check out offers from Offervault or other independent merchants.
Look for hooks, headlines, bullets, testimonials, and what emotional buttons they push. All of this data should be logged in your spreadsheet. Once you’re done collecting information, you should have a definitive top 10 list of things to try in your own sales messages
Read the “Affiliate Program” Pages for Merchants:
You should seek out merchants in your niche and look at pages or websites they have put together for their affiliates. These are usually full of promotional tools that you can use, keywords to think about, as well as giving general information about your niche.
Remember that this data is available to everyone else too, so don’t just go with what one merchant says. Compile the data from multiple sources – and then pick the best of the best ideas.
Browse Forums:
When you are browsing forums in your niche, take notice of what forum categories are used. Also, take a look at popular threads and recurring questions. This gives you a good idea of how to structure information and what people are looking for in your niche.
TIP: When you’re done with the initial research phase for your niche, cut down the amount of time you spend on the forums. You still want to stop by to keep up, but there is a thing as spending too much time on a forum. Remember to apply what you have learned.
Find and Read Blogs:
In addition to popular forums in your niche, check out the blogs. In particular, look at the most popular posts as well as the comments on the blogs.
Most of the time, this will be a very valuable source for information about your niche. People really open up and share their thoughts and challenges they are facing.
Visit ezinearticles.com
This article directory is another way to get ideas. Search for keywords in your niche. Take a look at what the articles say.
What headlines are used? What products are being promoted? All of this information can lead you to what is important in your niche.
TIP: Use RSS to keep up on leading writers in your niche. This can be a good way to see emerging trends when they occur.
Find Unbiased Customer Reviews of Products:
Search the Internet for questions like “does xyz work.” This will lead to quite a bit of information from consumers – the “truth tellers”, when it comes to product reviews. Well, most of the time.
As with the other ideas, you want to collect a lot of data from many websites and compare similarities to see what the most important aspects for your niche are going to be.
You can also search for product names on popular niche forums. This will tell you how consumers feel about a product. If the product is of low quality, you can avoid it. If the product has weaknesses, you can create a bonus that “fixes” the problem. This is a great way to add value to your affiliate promotions.
Search MARKETING Forums:
Take a look at marketing forums to see what (if anything) other marketers are saying about this niche.
By looking around and researching on what others have done, you can find out what has worked in the niche and what doesn’t. This is all great information that can help you succeed with your niche website.
Some marketers make the mistake of thinking “Oh, I don’t want to have anything to do with ‘internet marketing.’ I just want to go niche.”
Guess what, pal: You aren’t marketing in a vacuum. Every niche has prospects and marketers who sell to those prospects. Google, Youtube, Yahoo, MSN etc all have marketing departments.
That “niche” information product you want to promote is created by a marketer who knows a lot about information publishing, affiliate marketing, etc.
This ain’t charity. Instead of demonizing marketers, see how to leverage the work they have done.
PLR (private label rights) articles or auto-responder messages may be available. Or, ready-made landing pages. If so, these can make your life easier and help kick-start your advertising campaign…
Stay tuned for part 5 (the last one) :-)
If you got value out of this post, feel free to share it on Twitter or Facebook (or anywhere else you feel like).
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Niche Research Manifesto – Part 4
Niche Research Manifesto – Part 1
Niche Research Manifesto – Part 2
Niche Research Manifesto – Part 3
Other Sources of Niche Ideas
While dedicated tools and even the Google search engine itself are powerful ways to generate ideas for your niche, there are other resources you can leverage:
Yahoo Answers
This is usually a great way to see what questions people are asking. This can give you an idea of what some of your prospects want in your niche.
This information can be used to craft sales messages to be able to sell them products and make a profit. This is what a money-making niche website is all about.
Amazon.com
Amazon has been around for a long time – for a good reason – they know a lot about sorting products by price and quality. With the addition of customer reviews, they usually give a good look at products in any niche.
Look at the table of contents for various info-products in your niche. This will give you ideas on what are some of the sub-themes you can target.
Look at the customer reviews. Focus especially on the negative ones (1-2 stars). Those usually reveal unmet needs and opportunities for you to come in.
Read Merchant Sales Letters
By looking at how your competitors sell to prospects, you are going to know what’s working. As with other sources, keep a spreadsheet of the data so similarities can be noted. You want the best of the best techniques.
Pay careful attention to the Clickbank marketplace, because many sales letters have all the right elements. Also, check out offers from Offervault or other independent merchants.
Look for hooks, headlines, bullets, testimonials, and what emotional buttons they push. All of this data should be logged in your spreadsheet. Once you’re done collecting information, you should have a definitive top 10 list of things to try in your own sales messages
Read the “Affiliate Program” Pages for Merchants:
You should seek out merchants in your niche and look at pages or websites they have put together for their affiliates. These are usually full of promotional tools that you can use, keywords to think about, as well as giving general information about your niche.
Remember that this data is available to everyone else too, so don’t just go with what one merchant says. Compile the data from multiple sources – and then pick the best of the best ideas.
Browse Forums:
When you are browsing forums in your niche, take notice of what forum categories are used. Also, take a look at popular threads and recurring questions. This gives you a good idea of how to structure information and what people are looking for in your niche.
TIP: When you’re done with the initial research phase for your niche, cut down the amount of time you spend on the forums. You still want to stop by to keep up, but there is a thing as spending too much time on a forum. Remember to apply what you have learned.
Find and Read Blogs:
In addition to popular forums in your niche, check out the blogs. In particular, look at the most popular posts as well as the comments on the blogs.
Most of the time, this will be a very valuable source for information about your niche. People really open up and share their thoughts and challenges they are facing.
Visit ezinearticles.com
This article directory is another way to get ideas. Search for keywords in your niche. Take a look at what the articles say.
What headlines are used? What products are being promoted? All of this information can lead you to what is important in your niche.
TIP: Use RSS to keep up on leading writers in your niche. This can be a good way to see emerging trends when they occur.
Find Unbiased Customer Reviews of Products:
Search the Internet for questions like “does xyz work.” This will lead to quite a bit of information from consumers – the “truth tellers”, when it comes to product reviews. Well, most of the time.
As with the other ideas, you want to collect a lot of data from many websites and compare similarities to see what the most important aspects for your niche are going to be.
You can also search for product names on popular niche forums. This will tell you how consumers feel about a product. If the product is of low quality, you can avoid it. If the product has weaknesses, you can create a bonus that “fixes” the problem. This is a great way to add value to your affiliate promotions.
Search MARKETING Forums:
Take a look at marketing forums to see what (if anything) other marketers are saying about this niche.
By looking around and researching on what others have done, you can find out what has worked in the niche and what doesn’t. This is all great information that can help you succeed with your niche website.
Some marketers make the mistake of thinking “Oh, I don’t want to have anything to do with ‘internet marketing.’ I just want to go niche.”
Guess what, pal: You aren’t marketing in a vacuum. Every niche has prospects and marketers who sell to those prospects. Google, Youtube, Yahoo, MSN etc all have marketing departments.
That “niche” information product you want to promote is created by a marketer who knows a lot about information publishing, affiliate marketing, etc.
This ain’t charity. Instead of demonizing marketers, see how to leverage the work they have done.
PLR (private label rights) articles or auto-responder messages may be available. Or, ready-made landing pages. If so, these can make your life easier and help kick-start your advertising campaign…
Stay tuned for part 5 (the last one) :-)
If you got value out of this post, feel free to share it on Twitter or Facebook (or anywhere else you feel like).