I hope you are discovering why I love Market Samurai so much and rely on it every day to help my websites deliver the goods. Keyword research is the cornerstone of any online business so you have to understand it and get it right or you will find yourself feeling frustrated and confused about why your niche market website is not performing as well as you hoped.

If you found this niche video helpful please leave me a comment.

I hope this video has given you some excellent insight into the endless possibilities for profitable niches. Please leave a comment if you have found it helpful!

By the end of today’s article I want you to have at least 5 big ideas for niche markets. Don’t panic! I know 5 ideas seems like a lot when you are having a hard time making money off of one now but by the end of this article you will have the resources to actively search out an unlimited amount of niches that will be money makers for you.

95% of problems with websites could have been avoided by doing market research before building the website. You may have decided to pursue a different route if you had done sufficient research first. The best ideas generally come from TV shows, markets, malls, etc. A trip to a farmer’s market can give you an abundant amount of ideas. For example candle making. There is a niche market idea on how to make candles and make money selling them at country fairs.

There are many sites available for you to research your markets. The first thing you should know when starting out is to stay away from the “big” topics.

Markets NOT to get into: Getting fit or losing weight, dog training, vitamins and health products, internet marketing, real estate marketing, etc.. You should not attempt to crack those markets on your first attempt. Leave them to the major leaguers. They have been done to death and you will not succeed tackling the big boys on your very first try. It is a waste of your time and energy. Stick to a small market and be successful. You will lose enthusiasm very quickly if you try to bite off too big of a piece of the pie.

For learning purposes you need to focus on a small niche market. Do not expect to make hundreds of thousands of dollars right off the hop. Start small and build your success. Aim for a few hundred dollars a month while you are learning. Once you have put all of the principles we teach into place you will see they are easily duplicated and you will get faster and faster at the process earning you more and more profit as you go. Once you have gained experience then you can begin dabbling in the “big boy” markets. Remember the big boys spend 8-12 hours per day with a large staff for support researching and marketing their niche. You cannot expect to compete with them as a newbie.

One method to selecting a market is to go with something you love and are very passionate about. Hobbies are usually excellent markets. Remember the last time you got involved in a hobby? You wanted all the info you could find on that particular topic. You bought books and spent hours researching it online. You bought accessories or tools, etc. Many of the smaller niches have so little info available that stumbling upon something new is very exciting and people eat it up!

If your business already has a product that fits into the “big boy” category then you need to focus on a smaller market to draw attention to your site. For example let’s say you have sugar free products for Diabetics. My market research tells me that you are competing with 841,000 other websites targeting Diabetics. You can’t possibly expect to get noticed by targeting all diabetics in your marketing campaign. BUT if you focus your marketing to a smaller market such as “diabetic cookies” you are only competing with 21,000 other sites. That is a much more manageable number for a beginner!

Focus and specialize! Tapping into a small niche market of a hot topic can be very profitable IF you do the research. If you focus on several small markets you will have much more success than trying to tackle a massive one.

A few sites that will give you ideas of what is hot are:

http://pulse.ebay.com
Here you can find out what people are buying on eBay. Again, stay away from the obvious. Go into the various categories instead of staying with the top 10 searches which are almost always computers and electronics. Dig deeper into specific categories to get an idea.

http://www.technorati.com/
Learn what people are blogging about here. Which blogs have the most traffic. What topics are they covering. From this you can see what people are passionate about.

http://groups.google.com
Look to see what groups have the highest traffic. This will give you a good idea of what hobbies and interests are hot.

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends
Find out what topics people have searched for the most. Yes, Brittany and Paris are STILL there, but there is a wealth of information and ideas waiting on this page.

VIDEO: Here is a video that will show you how to get ideas for profitable niches

Okay…that’s it for today. Visit these sites and start your research. Tomorrow we will spend more time teaching you how to refine and narrow your niche markets.

Task for today: Research your markets and narrow your focus down to 5 different ideas.

Lesson 3