Thinking of entering a new niche? Before investing time and effort to create products or content for a niche, you really need to spend some time on market research. You need to know whether enough other people are interested in the subject that the market is big enough, and you need to know that the competition isn’t so fierce that you’ll never get the exposure you need to be profitable.

My top 3 free tools for market research are Amazon.com, Clickbank.com and Google.com – let’s take a look at each in turn.

Using Amazon for market research

Amazon is a great tool for market research. Go to the magazines section and have a browse around. At time of writing, there are over 93,000 titles so there are plenty to choose from. Start with a more generic topic, such as golf, or computing, then look for narrower sub-niche publications. If publishers are producing a magazine about a topic then you know that at the very least there are a few thousand people out there willing to spend a few dollars on the price of a magazine for their hobby or interest!

There are over 93,000 magazine titles on Amazon

If you find topics that you think might interest you, it’s worth getting hold of a copy of the magazine and taking a look at the type of content, what products are being advertised in it, how technical the content is, and anything else you can glean. If possible, look at several consecutive issues. If a certain product or service is advertised again and again, you can be sure that people are buying!

While you’re at Amazon, another great thing to browse is the ‘For Dummies’ books. Again, you know that if there is a ‘For Dummies’ book, there has to be a market… they don’t make these books if nobody is buying them!

Clickbank as a market research tool

You probably know about Clickbank, and selling affiliate products from their marketplace, but did you realise it’s a great tool for researching your niche?

Clickbank – thousands of products you can promote, and great to research the market!

Here’s what to do. Go to Clickbank.com and click on the marketplace link at the top right of the screen. You’ll see a search form which allows you to filter and search through all the products available through Clickbank. The reason this is so cool, is that these are all information products, like ebooks, downloadable audio or video etc. That means, if there is a product (or even better, several products) in the niche you’re interested in listed here, you know that there are people buying products in this niche on the Internet… and they might well buy your product too! It also means that you have potential affiliate products to promote in that niche.

Google for niche research

So you found a potential niche, using Amazon or Clickbank, but there’s one more piece of the puzzle. Ideally, you want to find a niche where other people are spending money (cold hard cash!) to reach their target audience. If you found any suitable magazines on Amazon and bought one you can tell instantly – are there lots of adverts in the magazine, offering products to this market?

Well if you didn’t find a magazine, or you want more proof, then Google comes to the rescue. When you do a search on Google, you’ve probably noticed that there are a group of listings that show up on the right hand side of the screen (and sometimes at the top) separate from the main listings. These are what Google calls sponsored links, or paid listings. Essentially, someone has paid Google for those links to show there whenever someone searches on specific phrases. For example, do a search for mountain bike on Google and you’ll see a results page something like this:

Google results page showing sponsored links on the right

Again, if you see a fair few adverts here when you search for keywords related to your niche, you know that people are paying to attract customers. Take a moment to click on each link and see what they are selling, but the important thing is are there adverts here. You know that since these adverts cost money, people must be buying products in this niche, otherwise companies wouldn’t be advertising!

The right niche

The right niche will depend on many factors. Are you planning on creating your own products, or just promoting affiliate products? Is it a topic you have a specific interest and passion for, or are you going purely on what the market dictates?

Trying to enter the wrong market is a sure fire recipe for failure. The more time spent at this stage, making sure you’re choosing a suitable niche will pay massive dividends in the future. My best advise is, to consider profitability and passion. To be successful you’re going to be spending a lot of time researching, writing and creating content around your niche as well as networking with other people within that niche. If you choose a topic purely because you think it will be profitable, but you have no interest in, you’re unlikely to keep your motivation up – ask yourself if you could write articles and blog posts about this topic, day after day? On the flip side, choose a subject purely based on your passions without checking out the market first and you could end up dominating a niche where there are no profits to be made… Take your time, choose wisely and always be willing to learn!