Image credit: Soshable
That’s right, social media.
You know — that place where you virtually hang out with friends, family, and business associates? Yeah, that thing.
Believe it or not, you can use social media to brainstorm niche ideas to kick-start your online business. Social networks are also fantastic tools to research your niche, i.e. learn about your target market, analyze your competition, and assess the profitability of a niche.
This article was transcribed from a video in my Niche Sherpa Video Coaching Course. Niche Sherpa is THE course for finding profitable niches and building a sustainable online business, with 19 niche-discover videos, step-by-step PDFs, online community, and more. Click here to try Niche Sherpa (almost) free for 14 days!
In this post I’m going to cover why offers are the foundation of marketing, and how to find affiliate products to promote. So let’s get into it!
What Exactly is an “Offer”?
First of all, it’s very important to understand what an offer is. It’s a word that we use all the time and sometimes we use it carelessly I think without understanding really what it is. Simply put, an offer is a bundle of benefits.
It’s important to understand that because when you are asking somebody to pay for a product that either you are promoting as an affiliate or that you have created yourself and are selling on your own site, you are asking somebody to exchange their money for the bundle of benefits that you are going to give them, whether be in your e-book, or in your audios or videos or software, whatever you are selling on your site.
So your goal basically is to craft an exchange that is perceived as valuable to your niche audience. And what you want to do is you want to make an offer, a bundle of benefits that is perceived as more valuable than what you are asking for your audience to exchange.
So to put it another way, when you go into a store and you are looking to buy a pair of running shoes for example, if the running shoes cost $100, the company that is trying to sell those shoes to you has to create in your mind that this is an exchange where you see the running shoes as more valuable or at least as valuable as $100 – otherwise, you are not going to exchange your money for those shoes.
So the perceived value of your product has to be higher than the price you’re charging for your product. This is an extremely important concept: marketing boils down to an exchange of value, so when you are creating your product (or choosing an affiliate product to promote), always keep in mind that the value you are offering the bundle of benefits has to be significant compared to what you are asking from your audience.
The Biggest Mistake Made by IM Newbies
Note: this is Part One in a 4-part series called “How to Launch Your Own Profitable Info Product in 60 Days”
So you’ve decided that you want to get into this “make money online” thing in a big way. What’s your first step?
Whoa! Hold on, Tiger! Sometimes it’s best to learn what to do by first learning what NOT to do. Let’s take a second to cover the most common mistakes I see newbies making.
The title of this post is a bit misleading – in this post’s video I actually show you the following:
(1) How to use the “Advanced Search” feature in Clickbank to choose a product that is likely to convert AND that you can promote without getting killed by your competition. In the video I also show you one particular Clickbank product that I think has great potential and little competition.
(2) How to do quick keyword and competition research to figure out if a Clickbank product gets enough searches (but doesn’t have too much competition)
(3) How to use a cool (free) tool set up by Howie Jacobson to calculate the profit potential of a product. (You could also use the tool to estimate the profitability of an entire niche, if you have numbers for all of tool’s inputs.)
Here’s a screenshot of Howie’s Search Volume Market Profitability Calculator, which can be found by clicking here.
Click image to enlarge
This tool is awesome for (at least) two reasons: it allows you to quickly determine if you should promote a particular product, and it isolates a handful of key factors that you MUST always have in mind when deciding to promote a product online.
Your thoughts?
Do you want to know what’s on the mind of your market, but don’t have time to do in-depth niche research?
Shame on you! Niche research is the most important part of an online business!
Okay, okay, so I’m biased. I love doing niche research!
But I know that sometimes we just want to do some quick-and-dirty market research to get a sense of what’s on people’s minds. That’s why I’ve whipped up a 15-minute video showing you five of the question-and-answer websites that I use to get a feel for a market.
In the video I take you briefly through these websites, and show how you can very quickly glean valuable insight into the needs of a niche.
Here are the websites I cover in the video:
How can you use the information that you get from these Q&A websites?
Well, I wouldn’t say the quality of info is good enough to develop a product from. But you could certainly use the information to quickly develop a free report for your blog/website, or use the information to figure out what the categories of your new website should be.
What tools do you use to do quick niche research?
Have you ever had a serious medical condition or been in deep financial trouble? If so, you probably spent a lot of time actively looking for a solution – whether that was talking to friends, consulting with trained professionals, or searching online for answers.
One of my sons has asthma, which flares up whenever he gets a cold. During the Canadian winter, kids tend to get a LOT of colds. So when my son was a toddler, we spent a lot of time in hospital, nervously waiting to see a doctor while our son coughed, wheezed, and gasped for life-sustaining breath.
In the eight years since our son was born, my wife and I have also spent much time trying to find a cure for his asthma. We’ve tried allopathic, naturopathic, and Ayurvedic medicines – and we’ve put a lot of energy into preventing him from getting colds, so his asthma wouldn’t be triggered.
Do you think we’d pay a lot of money if someone offered us a proven cure for asthma?
You bet we would!
When it comes to our son’s asthma, we fall into the “desperate buyer” category – a type of buyer that every Internet marketer needs to be on the look-out for – because desperate buyers can be the easiest to convert into sales (IF you have a proven solution to their problem).
In this post I’m going to describe 3 techniques that I use to find desperate buyers in health markets, which are the markets I operate in.
Let’s jump in!
3 Proven Techniques for Finding Desperate Buyers
Image by MassMoneyTrafficMachine
So you’ve selected an audience to serve, and brainstormed some problems faced by that audience. How do you zero in on the problems that have the greatest chance of making you a profit?
In this post I’m going to cover the key questions that I ask when researching a market. While answering these questions won’t guarantee that a niche will be a money-maker for you, filtering your ideas through them will GREATLY increase your chances of success.
So let’s jump in!
Is the Niche Large (Enough) and Stable?
In this post I’m going to give you some ideas for the very first step you should take when starting an online business: choosing a niche audience to serve.
You should choose a niche audience BEFORE picking products, or setting up a website, or diving into affiliate marketing.
Why?
There’s one key reason why choosing a niche audience is so important:
One of the questions I hear most often from new internet marketers is “I’m just getting started. How can I find an easy niche to get my feet wet in?”
What people are really saying when they ask that question is, “I’ve spent a lot of money learning this stuff – and I can’t afford to spend any more money without making some back!”
I completely sympathize with this, because in my first couple of years in IM, I spent hundreds (nay, thousands) of dollars learning, with little money coming back in. And, gradually, my wife went from excited supporter to cynical observer. A typical conversation from those days:
Me (excited): “I came across a new IM course today by guru X. I just know that this is THE course that’s finally going to kick-start my online business. The guru said so on his sales page!”
My wife (eyes narrowing): “Uh, tell me again when you’re going to start making money with this “hobby”?
The point is this: all new internet marketers could do with a “newbie niche”. A niche they can ease into, learn from and earn from (even if it’s a small amount of money), and then expand into other areas. A niche that wouldn’t cost them $1,000 in Adwords spend in two days, with nothing to show for it.
One of the most sensible questions I hear from new internet marketers relates to finding “evergreen” niches (in other words, markets that will be around for a long time).
I love this question, because it means people aren’t just looking to make a quick buck – they’re in it for the long haul.
Here’s a comment I received from a subscriber recently that sums up this sentiment:
“I am looking for a long term niche that is not just a quick buck scheme.”
If you’ve read my free report, you know that I strongly recommend that new internet marketers find a niche audience before they go looking for products to promote.
In other words, I don’t think marketers should be looking at products or industries before they gain an intimate understanding of their target audience.
In a nutshell, here’s the process I recommend:
1. Find a niche audience
2. Figure out what their problems are
3. Find products that solve those problems
4. Introduce the products to the audience!
It’s a very straightforward model. But having said this, I understand that some people (a) already have an audience selected, or (b) would like to find a market first, then work backwards to select an audience.
With that in mind, here are what I consider to be the best “evergreen” markets.
3 Evergreen Niche Market Ideas
