Article by Charlie Wright

I recenntly wrote an article giving you an overview of an internet marketing business plan. If you want to read it you can do so here.

Today I want to hit you with some more free advice. Yes, I know. What madness! I’m BRINGING IT ON!

This time the advice comes from Dan Thorley. He’s a  reader who’s successfully taken the step from hopeful seeker to home business entrepreneur.

Here he gives you 3 steps you need to take before you start almost ANY type of home business.  

Whether you’re into online selling, email marketing, blogging, product development, affiliate marketing, Amazon or eBay, you MUST first find a niche. By this I mean a specific area or topic in which you can specialise.

I’ll hand you over to Dan who can explain in more detail…
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How to find a red hot niche in 3 simple steps
By Dan Thorley

Talking about various marketing techniques is all well and good, but what do you do when you haven’t even decided which niche to be in, let alone what products to promote?

On one hand your niche has to be something you already have at least an interest in… or better yet a hobby. I wouldn’t recommend picking something at random just because it’s popular if you have zero interest in the subject. Remember you will be spending a lot of time focusing on that topic, so be aware.

On the other hand just because you have an attraction to a certain niche doesn’t necessarily mean other people will too, a bit of research is needed.  

What we are looking for is a niche that satisfies two essential criteria;

·         A need; there must be a big enough audience with a problem that requires solving
·         The means to fulfil the need; enough quality products or services that solve that problem

These are 6 key niches that meet those requirements;
1) Business Opportunity; information marketing, home businesses, eBay, Amazon etc
2) Competitions; lottery strategies, prize winning tips etc
3) Health and Fitness; weight loss, supplements, fitness tips etc
4) Lifestyle; dating, relationships, shopping, careers etc
5) Personal Finance; saving accounts, getting out of debt, mortgages, credit cards etc
6) Investments; shares, property, options, forex, spread betting etc
 
Here’s how to go about picking your niche…

The 3 step niche test

1) Go to Google and enter the first niche business opportunity in to the search box and click search. Make a note of the number of results. At the time of writing this came to a massive 102,000,000 this confirms that it’s a very popular niche.

2) Now search for the phrase business opportunity affiliate program this gave me 13,400,000 results. This is certainly more than enough but just click on few of the results to familiarise yourself with some of the affiliate programs available. So we now know this niche has lots of products to promote.

3) Finally go to AdWords Keyword Tool and enter business opportunity in the search box. This tells us if enough people are looking for information on our niche. As I write, for the business opportunity niche there are 550,000 global monthly searches and 40,500 local monthly searches. Although this isn’t 100% accurate it does give a strong indication of the popularity of this niche.  

Repeat this with the other niches in the list and make a list of your results to compare later.

You don’t have to stick with the 6 niches above, they are merely proven topics. Choose anything you want but make sure you go through the 3 step niche test to make sure you have a valid market.
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 Business from the Kitchen Table was set up by Daniel J Thorley. He has put together a complimentary report on search engine optimisation that will help you solve the problem of traffic generation forever. To download it instantly visit the website here.