Whether you are starting an online business or going into an existing market, doing good niche research is paramount. This would’ve saved me hundreds of hours if I had known the strategies within this post.
When you do proper research, it helps to validate if your market is sizeable and profitable enough to make money. Many entrepreneurs would’ve saved millions of dollars if they had just conducted proper niche research.
A little niche of just 1000 people willing to pay you $100 for your service or product will net you $100,000 right off the bat. If that niche is not being touched by competitors you can offer other services and make even more money.
Your niche doesn’t have to be large it just has to be profitable enough to be worth your time and effort. Now let’s begin.
Google Search
Doing a quick google search on your market can save you thousands of dollars. For example, you want to create a blog in the lifestyle niche. If you are going to create just a lifestyle blog, you will have a lot of competitors.
Using a simple tool like Google will help you to sub-niche and look for areas where there is not a lot of competitors. Instead of writing about lifestyle and all its facets, why not write about vegetarianism. Although vegetarianism might seem lucrative, there is still a lot of competition in that niche.
The web is over 20 years old, so it’s pretty developed and most of the broad niches are all occupied and taken over by huge blogs or media sites.
Let’s continue where I left off, instead of creating a blog on vegetarianism why not create a blog on turning your kids into vegetarians or “breakfast vegetarian diets”. With breakfast vegetarian diets, you are specifically creating a blog for breakfast recipes only.
It might not seem sexy but the goal is to find niches that are not competitive but still have a lot of followers. Once you are hooked on a niche it’s essential to look at the blogs and websites within that space on Google search. This will give you an idea of how your overall plan might perform.
By looking at the searches it’s obvious that by typing “vegetarian pet diets”. A lot of media websites popped up and not a lot of mini-blogs.
This could be for various reasons such as probably there are niches, probably the niche is not fully tapped and a lot of generic posts by media outlets are on the page.
It could also be that the keyword “vegetarian pet diets”, is occupied by large media outlets that have a lot of authority.
Sub Tip
Another strategy you can do is to scroll down to the bottom of the page and you will likely see google suggestions related to your search. These will give you additional keywords related to your niche that can write about.
In this case, we can see “Vegan cat food recipes”, “vegetarian puppy food” etc. These could be various topics to write about.
You can even click on them to go deeper within the searches or go to the next page and continue your research process.
Google Trends
Google trends can help to see how trendy is your topic of interest. It helps to give you a gauge on whether your topic is positively growing interest over time or it was just a fad and it is cooling off. Let’s see how far, “vegetarian pet diets” can get us.
When I typed in “vegetarian pet diets” I never saw anything popped up.
Probably that’s because there isn’t any interest locally in my region. You can easily change countries by clicking on the dropdown bar and change to the USA for example.
This is another roadblock that you might stumble when doing niche research. Sometimes your market might not be local and you will probably have to target a set audience from another geography.
Now there is still nothing. Let’s chop off the “pets” and leave “vegetarian pets”.
Now you can see the move of the trend relating to your keyword. It seems like the interest is a bit seasonal as it tends to go up and down.
At that moment you will have to decide whether you would want to work with a seasonal niche or find an evergreen niche that is trending all year round.
With Google trends, you can adjust not just the country drop-down menu but the time span whether an hour ago, 4 hours, several days, months, etc. These larger timeframes will help you to see how far your plan can go.
Another drop-down I found valuable is changing the search options, you can change it to YouTube search, image search, etc. If you are planning to post video content and YouTube you can use that to your inkling.
Online Communities
Online communities can be a great way to see if your niche holds any weight. You can do searches on subreddits, which are mini-communities on Reddit.
Reddit is a social media platform that is driven by tight-knit communities called subreddit or in broader terms forums where persons gravitating towards a certain niche can communicate.
Instead of doing “vegetarian pet diets Reddit”, you could change Reddit with “forums”, “Facebook groups”, “online communities” etc. You basically need to find a space where people are talking about your idea and topic.
This step can help you to understand the psychology behind your audience such as language patterns, idioms, etc.
Whenever you want to write a post or develop a product/service, you can use the ideas from your research session.
Magazines and Books
Books and magazines can also be another online resource you can use to understand your audience and to see if demand is there for your product or service. You can search for magazines related to your keywords “vegetarian pet diets”.
Additionally, you can search for books on Amazon related to your niche. If there are books related to your topic, you could say that it does have an audience.
Keyword Research
Doing bare-bones keyword research with various tools could prove to be worthwhile for your business. You have various tools available you can use to conduct thorough keyword research to give you an idea of your overall market.
Below is a list of tools you could use:
Free Tools
Wordstream
Keywordtool.io
Wordtracker
Google Keyword Planner
You have many other tools you can use. Also keep in mind that even though basic search functionalities of the tools listed above are free, to do advance searching you might need to buy an upgrade where the prices are often reasonable.
Paid Tools
Semrush
Moz Keyword Explorer
Wincher
In closing these are some of the easiest methods you can use to do market research to see how far your product or idea can go.
Similarly, to Google research, you could also use the same technique over YouTube to see how the market is reacting to your ideas.
It’s important not to stress over this period of getting overly analytical, just use the tools to get a rough overview of the market sentiment and make a decision.
