Picking a niche can be a difficult task if you go about it the wrong way... so how about we make it easy!

Watch How to Pick a Niche Video...

First of all, what is a niche?

A niche could be explained in several different ways:

• A niche is a situation or activity specially suited to a persons interests abilities or nature.
• a position particularly well suited to the person who occupies it; "he found his niche in the academic world"
• A niche is a certain segment of the population where you intend to concentrate your efforts.

For example, if you were thinking of building your business around finances, automotive, or weight loss; then you would target those particular people in those areas. However, finance, automotive and weight loss would be considered broad or general niches.

The problem with that is you are going to be taking on a lot of competition and make succeeding much harder. Also, I would think it to be very hard to offer everything available to your customers in those niches.

So the solution to that is to narrow your niche down further and choose a sub-niche within a particular niche.

For example; in relation to the automotive industry you have probably seen the water for gas products that show you how to convert your car to run on part water and get better gas mileage. This is a great example of how someone targeted one specific part of the automotive industry and made a complete business out of it.

To give you a better idea of what I'm talking about let's walk through a process to help you choose your niche:

To start with I suggest that you:

• Write down 5 to things that you LIKE doing or that you have an interest.
• Next write down 5 things that you are good at or have some knowledge or expertise in doing.

Now I didn’t say you had to be an expert. I said good, experience, knowledge or interest.

Here is a list that I put together:

Don’t try to over think these steps and don’t think as though you can’t teach others because you feel like you don't know enough. Also don’t think about if you are going to be able to find a product for that.

Focus on one step at a time and for the moment I want you to write these things down.

Now look at both of your lists and see what things stand out to you.

• Were any of them listed on both sides?
• What do you really like doing?
• What are you the best at?
• What are you most interested in?

These are things that you want to think about when choosing your niche. I suggest that you think about picking something that you like doing because this is something that you will be putting a lot of time into.

I know from experience that if you don't like doing something, then it can be very hard to make yourself work on it regardless of the fact that you know there can be money to be made in it.

For example, at one time I tried to market a product that was in the real estate niche. However, I hated it. I didn't like the research, I didn't like thinking about what I was going to write for my webpage, I really didn't like anything about it. And in the end I just abandoned the project.

So pick one from your list and lets research it. From my list above, I will use the keyword "trucks".

Now click on the following link and pull up the SeoBook Keyword Suggestion Tool.

In the search box I am going to type in the Keyword "trucks" (without the quotes) and click "submit". By the way, you have to click submit, don't hit the enter button on your keypad.

Now what this shows you is the average amount of times that people are typing these specific keyword phrases into search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN as well as many other things. But what we are focusing on are the keyword phrases and the amount of times it has been used to search.

These are keyword phrases that people are typing in every day.

Next scroll down to see the search results.

For instance, look at the keyword trucks. At Google alone there are over 3000 searches per day (every day) for the keyword trucks.

Used trucks returns a search for over 2000 searches per day at Google.

But as I said before, I don't want to take on the whole category of trucks. What I want to do here is to find a sub-niche within the category of trucks.

To do that I will scroll down further and look at more results.

First off I see truck accessories, pimped out trucks, used truck parts, truck bed covers, truck covers and lots of others.

For the purpose of this case study, I am going to choose the keyword phrase "truck covers" and research it a little more before deciding on it just yet.

So let's take this specific keyword phrase and go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Here you need to enter your keyword niche phrase into the search box which in our case is "truck covers".

Uncheck the box "Use synonyms", enter the characters into the box and click the "Get Keyword Ideas" button.

Now just like before in the SeoBook Keyword Tool, these results are keyword phrases that people have actually typed in Google to search for specific products all related to my main keyword phrase "truck covers". Also notice that all of the following keywords contain the keywords "truck and covers" because we unchecked the synonyms box.

Also, the Google Keyword Tool shows you the advertiser competition, the approximate search volume for the previous month and the approximate estimated search volume.

The advertiser competition gives us an indication if this niche is saturated with other advertisers. To get an idea all you have to do is to look at the green bars next to each keyword phrase. For instance, look at the keyword "truck bed covers" and place your mouse over the green bar next to it.

As you see, when you place your mouse on that bar it says "very high advertiser competition"

The one below this one says "high advertiser competition"

And as I scroll down the page I can't help but notice all the empty boxes which means there is "very low advertiser competition" on these specific keyword phrases.

This is exactly what I want to see.

Most searches will not have this many boxes with low advertiser competition. And if I did see that most all of the boxes were completely full, then I might would consider going back to the SeoBook keyword tool and look for another niche to research more.

But, from this observation do you think this would be a good niche with a sufficient number of people looking for this product?

I would say definitely say so!

Keep in mind, you can do this with any of your keyword phrases that you found with the SeoBook tool or the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

When you feel as though you have found a good niche to target then go after it. By concentrating on a niche such as this and not going after the whole broad market of automobiles, you could present yourself as an expert in this field through articles, your newsletters and such. And you can always offer products related to your product that you know your audience would be interested in.

Next Tutorial - Step 2:
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