How To Find Your Online Niche

How to find your online niche is possibly the hardest thing I’ve had to do so far. It was literally stressing me out and Sarah had to bring me back down to earth and sort me out (like she does so often!)

The most frustrating part about it was that I knew I couldn’t take action and get started until I decided on my “niche” (I really started to dislike this word, I’m not even sure if I pronounce it right!!) If you are finding it hard to think about what your niche is, or if you are interested in making money online, or if you have started a niche already but are unsure about it, then I hope this post will be able to help you out in some way. 

In fact, I have written with my former self in mind when I was thinking about my niche. I think this would have really helped me when I was trying to decide.

The Five Golden Rules

I really do believe that if you have a dream in mind whether it is travelling the world, or chilling in Barbados for a year, or to solve poverty in the world, then making money online is the way to get there. There are so many benefits to it!

The issue is that people will often spend so much time and effort online in a niche that simply is not going to make them any money. The reasons for this can be:

• There’s no demand for what you are offering
• There’s not enough competition
• There’s too much competition
• There are not enough affiliate links related to what your niche is
• Your niche is great for some people for a very short space of time in their lives

Anik Singal’s book “the circle of profit” is an amazing book to read if you have any interest in making money online. He talks about finding your passion that is profitable. Now, I’m going to decode the words he uses to make it more accurate and to the point here… Find a niche that is profitable that you are interested in… make money from it online… and it will become your passion.

So the five golden rules about ensuring your niche will be profitable are:

1. It Must be Digital Information Friendly
2. There must be Competition
3. The Size of Audience is Crucial
4. There Needs to be Popularity in Search Each Month
5. There Needs to be Long-Term Potential

This is what that means…

Digital Information Friendly

For example you cannot download furniture. Yes, most people have furniture and most people are interested in having nice furniture, but it’s hard to make any digital information about it.

Your niche needs to be something that can be in a digital form for people to access instantly online. For example, many people are interested in losing weight and it’s very easy to download a weight loss book.

Whatever your niche is, it must have some digital information that people will want to have (it must have some information). If you are not sure if this is possible in your niche, the next step will help you.

Competition

I found this one slightly counter-intuitive. It’s easy to think that if we can find a gap in the market, then we will have little to no competition, therefore, making it easier to become the best in this niche. However, if you can not find any competition for your niche online, there is probably a reason for it… it doesn’t work!

There are 3 ways to quickly assess whether there are any services or products in your niche online:

1. Clickbank
2. Udemy
3. Google

Clickbank and Udemy provide over 30,000 courses so if you cannot find a similar course to your idea, then your niche is too risky and you need to pick a new one.

You can also just use Google to check by typing your idea and course e.g. Gaining muscle course

You should be able to find something pretty quickly from this, but if you cannot find anything online… start again! Do not spend too long on this stage… this is just to see if it would work!!

Size Of Audience

This is definitely the most useful step that I found to decide on a niche!!

Facebook ads is an amazing resource for research. The best thing is that you don’t need to spend a penny to use it to figure out your niche.

Once you have signed up to Facebook Ads click on Ads Manager and Audience Insights in the top left corner (you may have to put in your card details but it will not charge you for anything in this stage).

Select the big five countries: US, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. This will give you a big enough insight into Facebook’s market (300million monthly active users).

Here is a walkthrough for how to use Facebook ads:

https://maketimeonline.com/FBadsniche

You can type in your niche to find out how many people are active each month on Facebook in that niche. The rough template for the numbers you are aiming for are:

Popularity in Search

Now that you know there is definitely an audience for your niche you need to qualify there are people that actually research it online each month.

There are 2 main resources for this one:

1. Google Adwords Keyword Planner
2. SEMRush.com

Google Adwords Keyword Planner

This is a great tool for this and it can really give some great insights behind the scenes. To be honest, I have hardly used it! Again you need to sign up, but this time you actually have to advertise a fictitious ad to get an account. At the last minute, you can delete your ad to not pay anything, and you still get full access to the free keyword tool. However, there is a free way to do this much quicker…

SEMRush.com

This is almost the same thing but the catch is you only get 10 free searches a day (which is more than enough at this stage).

Remember all we really want to do here is qualify that your niche will have some demand and can be profitable online. If it’s something that you are interested in and you don’t hit the perfect numbers from the guidelines then 100% start with that over something that you really don’t care about but fits better into the numbers below.

The main guideline here is that there are at least 10,000 searches for these keywords per month. Even if it has a lot more like “affiliate marketing” does (it has 40.5k searches per month- see above) then you know there will be demand. Remember these numbers are a guideline:

Long-Term Potential

There are niches that lend themselves much better to long-term potential than others e.g. “golfing tips” is a niche that a golfer will be interested in now and in years to come. “Infant teething” is a HUGE problem for parents, but only for a SHORT time.

I’ve seen my nieces and nephews go through teething at some stage and they become like a different baby. They cry all the time, they don’t eat properly and wake up in their sleep.

I know my sister would have done anything to help them go back to normal. However, this problem only lasts a short amount of time. If your niche was all about infants teething then you could make it profitable but you wouldn’t get any returning customers or be able to scale the business. 

A solution to this situation would be to choose an alternative sub-niche such as “child care” to grow topics that increase the long-term potential.

Niches That Are Very Profitable

You may have tried putting some niches through this system already but if you’re still struggling to find anything that works here are some niches that are already very profitable online. You may need to find sub niches from these ideas to ensure they are not too competitive but hopefully, they may provide you with some inspiration:

• Weight Loss, Bodybuilding, Healthy Eating, Superfoods
• Dating Advice, Divorce
• Property (or Real Estate for Americans), Investing
• Electronics, Gaming
• Pets
• Finding a Job
• Panic Attacks, Hypnosis

This is not the entire profitable list, it’s just some ideas to hopefully help you find something you are interested in. Some people call it passionate about but as I said earlier I believe it is more this order…

You are interested in the niche… you make money online… you become passionate about your niche.

MakeTimeOnline’s Conclusion

The main tip I can give you if you are undecided is to GET STARTED!!

Something else that I have realised from speaking to other successful affiliate marketers is that they end up having multiple niches. Do not let this scare you into thinking you have to create multiple niches right now. It just means that as they master one niche they have then started another interest of theirs to make that profitable.

These are some of the reasons I was getting so worked up about finding my niche (the answer is in brackets):

• I want to get started now, but I can’t without my niche (so choose an interest and go with it!)
• I don’t think I am truly passionate about this niche (remember you don’t have to be, once it starts making money online you will become passionate about it!)
• I’m not an expert in this niche so how am I supposed to write about it? (this is actually a good thing! Let people follow your journey into expertise, people will relate more to this. Once you start researching and spending more time on this niche you will end up knowing more about it than most people anyway)

I’m going to leave you with this quote…

Action is the antidote to fear.

Keep changing for the better,

Mike

If you would like to see my number one recommendation for getting started at making money online click here. It’s also a great way to find other people who are “crushing it” with affiliate marketing.