It’s easily the #1 mistake made by entrepreneurs, small business owners and especially online marketers today – not properly researching their niche markets.

Oddly enough, in the space of business books and online marketing training courses there is very little solid content helping people in this area — yet you will be hard-pressed to find a single process that will have such a major impact on your online business results. Knowing how to pluck golden opportunities out of niche markets is a skill that when paired with action, can make you incredibly wealthy.

Before we get started – NO, it’s not enough to just do some keyword analysis, that is NOT niche market research and in fact, only makes up a very small part of the overall process. 

What you want out of niche market research is to not only locate hot niche markets but to…

  • Know exactly what that niche market wants next
  • Understand the motivation behind their strongest desires
  • Limit your risk of market entry until you know there is big money to be made
  • Quickly decide on the single biggest niche market from a list you start out with
  • Match your niche market research with your ability to quickly and easily deliver products and services using skills and knowledge you already have – otherwise known as leverage!

These are your goals aren’t they?

How likely do you think it is that you can stumble upon a niche market that fulfills all of those objectives?

Even if you spent 10-minutes on keyword research, do you think you could isolate the real opportunity that will flood you with profit over the next couple of years?

Not likely – but there is a system that has worked for many online marketers, and it’s worked for us.  I call it my 5-step system for researching niche markets – try it out and find how powerful it is for yourself. 

(**Note**:  For those of you who want to go in-depth with this system and watch as we walk you through actual examples of applying this system to finding information product and online business hot topics and niche markets – join the many information marketing professionals already seeing the benefits over at InfoMarketer’sZone.com.)

NICHE MARKET OPPORTUNITY SYSTEM – 5 STEPS TO HOT OPPORTUNITIES

1. Step one is all about "spying" on your market and discovering what is "in-demand" today.  Here are some of the steps you will want to take to examine the current state of your niche market(s):

  •  Knowing what is in-demand through keyword research paying attention to both high-level keywords (ex. lose weight) and lower-level keywords (ex. lose weight hypnosis), monitoring relevant discussion forums, talking to your target market, monitoring popular blogs, podcasts, magazines for patterns.
  •  Know what is already selling well by searching eBay, Amazon and other online retail sites for trends and patterns as well as ratings such as the Amazon sales rank. 
  •  Study and list strong distribution channels which may include major website portals, forums, ezines, blogs and other avenues required to get your message to the market.  Not only is the presence of many distribution channels a healthy sign of an "in-demand" niche market, studying what they are marketing can be a major clue as to the present demand and supply of products and services that you want to eventually enter

Once you get a good sense for demand and distribution channels, you want to get a good sense for the size of your niche market…

2.  How big is your niche market  (roughly how many buyers) and how responsive are they  (by estimating what is already selling today, market analysis reports, etc…).  You want to prove to yourself a few things here:

  • That you can at least estimate the size of your niche market
  • That the size of your niche market is reasonable enough to thrive, but not so massive as to become hard to reach in a cost-effective way.  I’ve seen ranges of a few hundred thousand into the millions work for those with individual or micro online businesses
  • That if the niche is small, they are highly motivated to buy, have demonstrated a propensity to spend (see the next step) and that they are easily reached with your messaging.

I focus less on this step – only to say that the exercise of sizing your niche market is highly valuable as a method of getting to know who your customer is, how many of them there are, how responsive they are and how you will reach them.  At least when you proceed to the next 3 steps (researching trends, "test entry" into your market and identifying the biggest opportunity for entry) you will be ready to target your market with both eyes open. 

Step 3: Finding and aligning your business with long-term, upward trends…

The Full 5-Step System Is Available Here "Surefire 5-Step Niche Market Research System"

Jeff