A niche is an area of demand for information. Niches are usually small, but the size really doesn’t matter as long as it’s specific. This will be your bread and butter for all of the opportunities in this book. Most IMers live and die by niches, and a few are rewarded heavily for using them correctly.

How do you find good niches?

Well, here’s what I do – I think about everything from a marketing aspect. Yeah, sounds pointless, right? Wrong. I analyze everything now. In order for a company to spend thousands of dollars on a TV, radio, or print advertisement, there has to be a need (or they have to think there is a need). So I assume that a commercial that runs frequently, and for a long period of time is catering to a particular target market, and they’re eating it up, otherwise the company would stop advertising to them.

I take that information and think about how I could use that it online. I think about where the target market would be at on the ‘net, and what they would be doing. Then I try to find out what I could do to monetize that information.

Niche Research

When I think I have a popular (and profitable) subject, I use Nichebot.com to check on its search volume. Nichebot will look at the searches for the past 60-days and give you the most searched keyphrases that relate to the keywords you entered. Then, you can use the # of searches (for Wordtracker results, it is the average searches per day, for Overture results, it’s over the past 60 days) and the competition ratio to determine if I want to build my site around it. Basic rule of thumb is the lower the ratio, the better the keyword.