Oct 10
10
Brainstorming – How To Find Good Niche Markets
Brainstorming is one of the most important parts of your strategy for making money online. It is often skipped over quickly as we are all in a hurry to make money. Picking the correct niche market is vitally important when you first start making money online because you probably don’t have a large budget and you need to create some money quickly. If you choose a niche that is too competitive, you might end up spending all your budget and never get noticed. If you pick a market that is too small with low margins, you may find that there is not enough traffic for you to generate any income.
So what type of market is best and what type of competition can you handle with a small budget. Well, here is a mistake that most new marketers make when they decided to make money online. They think that they should create an e-commerce store like Sears, Walmart, Best Buy, Bass Pro Shop, JC Whitney, and other large stores that sell all sorts of products. I do realize that those companies are making millions and even billions of dollars and that would be nice to have, but we are going to start out with something realistic. Remember, we don’t need to make 1million dollars right now, we just need to make $100 per website per month. The best type of market is a market that has high profit margins, good traffic and low to medium competition. I want to find niches that I can make $10-$100 per sale using an affiliate program with the long term option to sell these products via drop shipping or wholesale.
When I have this mindset of the type of market that I am looking for, I will take a notepad and write down some ideas. Usually I will start with some markets that are personally interesting to me. For example, I am interested in the automotive industry. So I think about things that I could sell in that industry. Here again, I wouldn’t want to create a website that sells every type of auto, every type of automotive part, and every tool used for the automotive industry. I want to narrow down my focus quite a bit. So I will begin at the top, should I sell cars, well there is a lot of paper work and licenses required to sell cars, but I could sell car leads. Many auto dealers will buy leads for up to $50 dollars per lead. So I could call around to local dealers and see what the going rate is, but this will not fit my future e-commerce drop shipping or wholesale model. So I will move on to something else. I could sell parts for cars, or sell tools for mechanics, but then I would be competing with Auto Zone, Advanced Auto, Mac Tools, etc…. So, for me I want to choose something more specific that has large margins and less competition. I could still compete in the parts industry or the automotive tool market, but I want to focus my sites on specific tools or specific categories of parts. Normally I will pick up a magazine or browse the web and go through some of the categories. So for the examples that I used… Lets say we are looking at car parts. I find that the more expensive parts have to do with racing or extreme use of parts whether for show or off-road. So if I narrowed my site down to racing parts, I would find that the market is still way to competitive. (we will cover how to determine market competition in a future post) So a market that would be ideal for us would be something that would be a niche within that market. Such as selling performance headers, race suspension, racing seats, race fuel cells, etc… When you break it down to this level you are able to focus your site on a niche that is a sub category of your main competition. Also, you can often find domain names with your keywords for you niche which also gives you an edge on your competition in the search engines.
Now that you see how we find niches it is important to realize that just because you are building niche sites doesn’t mean that you can’t compete with the large market giants. You will just go about it in a different way. One main advantage that you have over them is that you can move faster than them. Once you get your strategy going, you will be able to build hundreds of websites in no time at all. This means that you gradually take over the market 1 sub category at a time and before you know it you are dominating the market with hundreds of sites in their niche.
So to conclude this post about brainstorming, I would say that I don’t always look for crazy ideas that no one has ever tried, or come up with weird niches that no one has ever heard of. I just take successful markets and break them down to a level where I can compete.
