How To Evaluate And Test Your Niche Without Wasting Time And Money (Part 7 of The Ultimate Guide to Finding Your Profitable Niche)
This post is part 7 of The Ultimate Guide To Finding Your Profitable Niche.
Wooooah, easy tiger…
Just because you’ve found what seems like a profitable niche idea, doesn’t mean it will be suitable for you.
Because here’s the thing:
Not everyone is a good fit for every niche.
And this is especially true if you’re picking a ‘money’ niche over a passion/interest niche, where you don’t know much about the topic.
Some niches, no matter how profitable they are for others, you’ll just never crack as you never quite figure out what makes the audience members ‘tick’ (i.e. buy).
Or you just won’t be able to do anything to stand out from all the others in your niche.
And if you’re not doing anything at all different why would anyone pay attention, right?
Because think about it…
Even though you absolutely do not have to reinvent the wheel or create anything innovative.
You do have to do something a little bit different from everyone else or at least have a unique twist to get noticed.
But don’t worry:
This isn’t as difficult as it sounds when you follow my process.
And there’s a way to test your niche ideas, quickly and cheaply, before committing long term.
So that you don’t waste a lot of time and money on a niche that isn’t profitable.
Or that you personally can’t make money from.
So let’s look at how you can evaluate and test your ideas first…
How To Figure Out Your Unique Twist
As I said above you do not have to reinvent the wheel.
You are not trying to come up with a niche or business model that is innovative or unique.
Nor create something no one has ever seen before.
Leave that to the likes of Steve Jobs.
What you need to do is:
Find a unique angle within the niche that no one else is focusing on or doing well.
Or to be able to do things differently or better than the current competition, which isn’t as hard as it sounds as you’ll find out in a second.
An example of some early NicheHacks content that anyone could create better than
Simply go through the process and take notes of everything you find.
You may discover a certain type of audience member not being well catered to.
Or common mistakes everyone else in the niche is making that you won’t.
There may be glaringly obvious products you could be selling to them that others aren’t.
You may find that the content in your niche, on the whole, is poor, lacking any depth, or all video content but little written for example meaning there’s room for something different.
Or it could simply be the competition are poor marketers and someone like yourself who’s learning about marketing could easily outperform them.
I cover some of these areas in more detail below…
Create Better Content
It could be as simple as being able to offer better or fresher content.
If your competitors are only doing short 500-word blog posts and you see a need for more in-depth posts you can start creating longer posts with more ‘meat’.
You could create Ultimate Guides like this one.
- Write longer posts with more detail.
- Create more image-based, social media-friendly, content.
- Do case studies.
- Create Podcasts
- Do video marketing and webinars.
- Create infographics.
- Offer free guides, tools, software, and more than others are charging for.
In-depth ultimate guides, like this one, can really help you stand out
If your competitors are not willing to do it then you should be.
This will give you a fresh twist on the niche.
Or you could take a unique approach to the niche as I cover below…
Take A Unique Approach To The Niche
Another trick is attacking the niche at a unique angle that no one else is doing
i.e. If looking to offer weight loss advice to men over 50, you niche down and offer advice on men over 50 who have heart problems for example.
There are always sub-niches within niches.
Always a group of people looking for specialized information targeted at them.
The best thing to do is to create your ideal customer or visitor and write content ONLY for them.
Don’t try and create content for everyone and anyone.
It becomes vague and puts people off because there’s so much content they don’t want to see mixed in with the stuff they do.
To find sub-niches you can use this guide.
Or, there’s always this…
Be A Better Marketer
You can compete by simply being a better marketer than your competitors.
And look don’t worry:
You might be new to online marketing but the fact you’re here reading and learning put you way ahead of many hobby bloggers who just blog for fun and don’t learn about it.
If you are able to provide good quality content AND market more effectively you can’t help but succeed.
Being a better marketer includes being able to create better content, optimize for SEO, drive traffic to your site and convert that traffic into sales.
Good news: we cover ALL of that on NicheHacks.
NicheHacks has you covered on all topics on online marketing
And on the subject of traffic, you better read this next section…
Can You Get Traffic?
One thing you need to figure out the way before you start on a project is whether you can get traffic.
There are endless ways to get traffic to sites as I’m sure you know including:
You have to work out what your method will be and whether it’s achievable.
Our ultimate guide to traffic covers ALL traffic strategies you’ll ever need
A few ways to do this:
As long as you can see some opportunities here it’s a good sign.
We cover 100s of ways to get traffic on the blog that you can evaluate.
Paid Advertising For Traffic
If you want to focus on paid advertising there are many options including:
Which of these options makes the most sense will depend on your niche.
An Example of Google Adwords Ads for Email Software
For now, you simply want to consider where your target audience hangs out to determine
if there are viable paid traffic sources.
In this day and age, there’s a paid traffic source for everyone and every niche.
Some things you can look at…
You’ve now done some basic evaluation of your niche and have a better idea if it’s something you can compete in.
But you’re not done yet.
Let’s be 100% absolutely certain that you can make money from it.
By testing it.
Learn how to do that below…
Testing Your Potentially Profitable Niche
Then you’re almost good to go.
But before you jump in and spend months working on it you should run a small test first just to be 100% sure this is a profitable niche for you.
Here’s how to do that easily, quickly, and cheaply…
Testing A Blog / Niche / Affiliate Site
If you wanted to start a blog then test first on a small scale.
The process:
Aweber offers a $1 free trial which is useful for testing first
If you’d prefer to test on an even smaller and quicker scale here’s how…
Testing An Email List
If you simply wanted to build an email list around your niche first then:
ClickFunnels has a free trial for 14 days you can use to create an option page
If you plan to create a digital product use this process…
Testing A Digital Product
Before you create a product you’ll want to test that people will actually buy it.
How to do this:
People buy digital products to become better versions of themselves.