How To Find A Profitable NICHE

Hello In this Post, I’m going to share with you how you can find a profitable niche and

market for you to publish a book in.

In this Post, we’ll cover:

• Criteria For Successful Niches

• The Niche Test

• Broad Vs. Narrow Niches

• Brainstorming Potential Niches

• Links And Resources

• Exercise

Criteria For Successful Niches

I have a general criteria that I use to help me identify profitable niches on

Amazon that I can potentially publish a Kindle book in. While it’s helpful to

follow this criteria, it isn’t completely necessary. This criteria is more of a

guideline that I use, rather than a rule. I’ve had many cases that I’ve gone

away from this criteria and made money with my books, but I often find

myself coming back to this criteria again and again as it’s proven to be

effective and useful for beginners.

The Niche Test

I learned about “The Niche Test” from one of my mentors, Eben Pagan.

With this test, there’s three questions that I ask myself when getting into a

niche.

1. Is my prospective customer experiencing pain and urgency, or

irrational passion? Are they feeling strong emotion?

LESSON 1

Finding Profitable Niches

2. Is my prospective customer proactively looking for solutions?

3. Does my prospective customer have few or no perceived options?

With the first question, I want you to think about niches or markets where

the prospective customers have strong emotion or urgency to find a

solution. An example of this could be the weight loss market. If someone

is over-weight, they’re generally experiencing pain and humiliation from

that, and are desperate to find a solution. They’ll easily spend money to

get out of that pain if the product they find meets their needs.

An example of a niche where there might not be as much emotion or

urgency would be in the recipe niche. While someone might be looking for

specific recipes, they don’t have that level of URGENCY to buy now and

get out of pain. Does that make sense?

Here’s some examples of niches where people are experiencing

strong emotions:

• Getting Out Of Debt

• How To Stop Smoking

• Weight Loss

• Credit Repair

• How To Make Money

• Diseases And Illnesses

• Marriage Problems

• Dating And Relationships

• How To Get Your Ex Back

There’s many more out there, but all of the examples listed above are

instances where people are experiencing pain and urgency. They are

desperate and are looking for solutions RIGHT NOW. If you can find a

market or niche like this, you don’t have to spend time trying to “sell” or

“convince” the customer to buy your book - they will buy it because it will

help them solve their problem right away.

With the second question, you want to ensure that the prospective

customer is searching for the specific keywords to find your book in the

Amazon search engine. We’ll be going over this later, but with the Amazon

website, you are able to see which keywords people are typing in, which is

valuable information in letting us know if they are LOOKING for a book to

solve their problem. If people are looking for your book, you don’t have to

try to convince them or “sell” them - they will naturally find you and buy your

book because you are giving the market what they want.

With the third question, you want to ensure that there isn’t too much

competition for your book and that they can’t easily find the information for

free elsewhere. Of course, with the world of the internet, information is

easily attainable for free on most websites. While that’s true, people are

also still buying books and products to help them solve their problems. The

reason is because some information is more available for free than others.

With the example of someone looking for “cheesecake recipes”, while

someone might buy your book on it, it’s just as easy for them to search on

Google and find thousands of cheesecake recipes for free. Whereas with

something like “how to get your ex back”, it’s more difficult to find that

information for free and people will perceive the solution to that problem

more valuable to them. The bottom line is, information on “how to get your

ex back” is worth more to people than “cheesecake recipes”. Make sense?

Again, this is just a GUIDELINE.

I’m not saying recipe books don’t sell - they do, and it is in fact a very

profitable niche. But for your first books, I’d recommend to try to follow this

guideline, and as you get more experienced with your publishing, branch

off to different areas and feel free to experiment with other markets.

You Don’t Want The Market To Be Too Narrow

Broad Vs. Narrow Niches

It’s important to understand that some niches are more competitive than

others. While “weight loss” is a fantastic niche and is clearly profitable, it

also comes with a ton of competition. When there’s a lot of competition, it

can be more difficult for your book to stand out from the other more

established books and out-rank them in the search results. That’s why I’ve

found it to be important to target niches that are a bit more specific and

narrow. But at the same time, if your niche is “too narrow”, then there might

not be a strong enough market for it.

For example, I remember my sister published a book on predicting your

baby’s gender. While there was a market available, it was too small to

really profit much from. The reason is because with the market of

“predicting your baby’s gender”, you’re instantly eliminating men and are

only targeting women that are pregnant. I’m not sure what percentage of

people on Amazon are pregnant and looking to predict their baby’s gender

at any given time, but from our experience it wasn’t too big. The book had

a difficult time because it was too narrow of a niche.

It’s a fine balance between being too broad and too narrow. Weight loss is

too broad, whereas “weight loss motivation” is more specific and narrow,

and there’d most likely be a potential market for it. We’ll be going over how

to analyze the competition later to analyze this further, but one of the best

ways to really discover profitable niches is through your own trial-and-error

experiences. The reality is, some of your books in different niches will do

better than others. Some might fail and only produce a small cash flow,

whereas others might hit it big and produce a monstrous cash flow each

month. The more experience you have with this, the better you get at

identifying niches and markets that are profitable.

Brainstorming Potential Niches

The first thing that you’ll want to do is brainstorm and come up with a list of

potential niches. Don’t worry about these potential ideas being too

competitive or anything like that - we’ll go over that later. For now, just

open up your mind to as many ideas as possible. You’ll want to take out a

pen and paper and make a list.

One way you can get an idea of the potential niches out there is to browse

around the Kindle store and see what other books are out there. The great

thing about this is that Amazon lists different categories for their books,

which can give you great ideas for niches.

If you go to http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-eBooks, on the left-hand

sidebar you’ll see a list of categories. I usually always make sure to

browse the non-fiction categories. If you dig around, you’ll get many ideas

for what categories are out there and potential niche ideas.

Here’s a list of potential niches I discovered while browsing the

categories in the Kindle store:

• Death/Grief

• Disorders/Diseases

• Diabetes

• Happiness

• Memory Improvement

• Motivation

• Self-Esteem/Confidence

• Stress

You don’t need to know anything about these niches for them to be on your

list. We’ll be covering later how you can hire writers to write your book

inexpensively. They’ll do all the research and everything for you - your role

in this whole process is to be a marketer, not a writer. I learned a long time

ago that writers do NOT make money, MARKETERS make money! You

want to be a marketer, trust me! (That doesn’t mean you can’t write

your own book if you want to do that and you enjoy it... I’ll cover that

later.)

Another resources that I use to brainstorm potential niches is the website

EzineArticles.com. EzineArticles is a popular article directory on the

internet that people publish their articles on. I’ve found it useful to look at

their categories and even popular articles on their website to get an idea for

which niches are popular.

Here’s a list of potential niches I discovered while browsing the

categories in EzineArticles:

• Acne

• Acupuncture

• Aerobics

• Allergies

• Anti-Aging

• Anxiety

• Asthma

• Arthritis

• Autism

• Back Pain

• Depression

• Diabetes

• Drug Abuse

• Eye Vision

• Weight Loss

• Thyroid

• Hair Loss

• Achievement

• Addictions

• Coaching

• Goal Setting

• Grief Loss

• Happiness

• Leadership

• Stress

As you can see, there’s tons of potential ideas for niches! You should have

a never-ending list and should never be saying, “I can’t think of any niches.”

Just by searching a few websites in a few minutes, you can easily make an

entire list as I just did.

Another strategy is using a website called Clickbank.com. Clickbank is a

website that vendors can offer their products through. Affiliates can easily

find products in the Clickbank marketplace and promote them, making a

commission for every sale they make. The Clickbank marketplace is a

place that I frequent to see which products are selling on there and which

ones are profitable.

You need a Clickbank account to be able to view the marketplace. You can

easily sign-up at www.Clickbank.com. Once you’re logged in, click on

“Marketplace” at the top navigation bar. You’ll now be able to see a list of

categories of products and be able to browse through them. I usually look

at the “Gravity” of the products listed to see how profitable the product is.

The Gravity indicates how well the product is selling with other affiliates

promoting it. Searching through Clickbank takes a bit more time than the

other strategies mentioned, but can be worthwhile to find a good niche.

Finally, another strategy that I’ve used to brainstorm potential niches is just

visiting my local bookstore. I’ve found that by spending a few minutes in

there, I can easily find a list of potential niches just by looking at the

different categories and books listed there. I’ve found all of these

strategies to be equally as effective. Give them a try!

Links And Resources

Here are the links and resources that were mentioned in this lesson:

Kindle Store:

http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-eBooks

EzineArticles Website:

http://www.ezinearticles.com

Clickbank Website:

http://www.clickbank.com

Exercise

The exercise for this lesson is to come up with a list of at least 10 potential

niches based on the resources provided in this lesson.

Once you have your list, we’ll begin to analyze them to see which ones

have the highest potential of making money.