Finding a Niche

So, now that you have had a chance to think about all of your interests and hobbies, what have you come up with? Did you find that you are interested in cars (very popular) or hampsters (perhaps less popular)? If so, don't think that you will be out of luck. There is a niche market for everyone, whether your passion is a popular or unpopular one!!

Once you have found what you are interested in, the next step is to find a niche market. If you are wondering what that is, it is a group of people who are all looking for the answer to a problem, or information on a certain topic. If hampsters is your area of expertise, perhaps there are people out there who want to learn how to teach their hampsters how to do tricks. Since you know how to do that, that's what your website will be about. Maybe your business will be to offer an ebook on how to teach your hampster tricks.

How do you find what people are searching for? I use Wordtracker. You can find it at http://www.wordtracker.com/ and they will let you try a scaled-down version for free (I think it only lets you search MSN). For about $7.00 a day or $30.00 a week you can have access to wordtracker.

What you will do, once you have access to wordtracker, is to start entering words that describe your interests into "keyword universe". Start with something general, like "hampsters". Wordtracker will provide you with a bunch of words similar to hampsters and as you click on each one, a list will appear on the right side of the screen with words and phrases that people are actually searching for on the internet. Add the ones that look good to you to the basket. Once you have a bunch of keywords in your basket, do a "competition search" and find out how many people are searching for those keywords compared to how many competing websites there are. Wordtracker will assign a "KEI" number for each result. You are looking for a high KEI (at least 10). This will be a keyword that has a lot of searchers and not a lot of answering websites.

Once you have some keywords with high KEIs, you can brainstorm about what website you might be able to have that solves this problem.

Next time, we will discuss the types of websites there are and what you can sell on yours.

Happy wordtracking!

Barb