I have written before about finding a niche for your online business but I was asked about low competition niches so in this post I want to talk about finding profitable ‘low competition” niches.
Note that I mean LOW not NO competition. If there is NO competition then there is most likely NO market and NO customers.
We are specifically looking for niches with good profit potential and low competition. If you have both, then you have a good chance of carving out a part of that market for yourself.
We’ll look at how to come up with a list of potential niche markets, as well as whether or not you’ll be able to break into the market.
Create a Broad List of Topics
First, come up with as many topics as possible. You’ll later narrow this down to just the one or two that have the most potential.
Write down all your personal interests and passions. Come up with at least ten things that you’re either passionate about or have knowledge in.
Then visit a magazine or bookstore. Look at the magazine racks and jot down any ideas you have for niches and sub-markets. Do this for a week or two.
Once you have a few high potential markets to look at, then it’s time to evaluate each niche’s potential.
Researching Established Brands
Now you are going to explore the market. Take your time to get to know this market. Get a sense for what the biggest brands in your space are. You can do this by doing Google searches for a wide range of terms and seeing what sites come up.
Also, read as many blog posts and forum posts as you can on prominent industry forums. What are names of companies and people that are often mentioned? Who’s viewed as the “gurus” or the best resources in the space?
Ideally, you’re looking for a market that has a few competitors, but nobody that has an extremely strong foothold. If there are multiple strongly rooted companies in the market already, you’ll probably have a hard time breaking in.
Competition for Search Terms
This part of the research is more statistical. You find the keywords you plan on targeting, then figure out exactly how much traffic those terms have and how much competition you’re facing.
Look at the PageRank, the incoming links, the domain age and the estimated traffic of the websites that come up first for your target search terms.
Are these sites established sites that are deeply rooted in the industry? Or are they relatively new sites with few incoming backlinks?
In other words, do you believe you’ll be able to beat those sites to a number one, two or three position within about six months?
For your first time, it’s best to aim for search terms that you can easily rank for. As you get more experience, aim for tougher and higher reward keywords.
Summary
So, to sum things up, the process looks something like this:
Brainstorm as many ideas as you can. Then cross off the ideas that clearly won’t work out.
For the remaining ideas, research the traffic and competition data, as well as getting an idea of how loyal people are to the top brands.
Yes, it is time consuming and I have to confess that I find it a bit boring at times BUT if you do not do the work up front, then you will most like waste far more time and effort in a doomed project.
