There are plenty of places to find your next niche. They may even be right in front of you. In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned when you are choosing your first niche, to pick something you are passionate about. If you are in a niche you are passionate about then a good source for new ideas may be  within your niche.

Just think back in time when you first started learning about that niche. Put yourself in the customers shoes. What were the first things you wanted to learn? What were the first questions you had? What were the stumbling blocks or things that just stumped you? What were the next things you wanted to learn? Take notes as you go back in time and relive the journey of how you got to be so knowledgeable about that niche. I’m sure by the time you are done you will probably have your next product or two picked out.

Another good source is your customers. Have you ever polled or surveyed your actual customers to see what they want to learn? Most would answer no, and my question would be “why not”? Most peoples response would probably be something like “I know what my customers want” or “They keep buying my stuff so I must be doing something right”. Well, your customers answers may surprise you.

Your customers may like you, and your customers may have built up some kind of a relationship with you BUT if you cannot answer their next big question or get them past their next stumbling block, who says they will stay your customer. Who says they won’t jump ship and go check out some other expert who’s sales letter is very good and they say they “Have the answer I have been looking for all along”, plus bonuses. Get it. Unless you KNOW what your customers REALLY want, they WILL be buying elsewhere.

The ONLY people who have the skill to think just like their customers are all millionaires.

Another great source for finding your next niche market is your local grocery store or book store. Whichever has a large selection of magazines. Look through the popular magazines in your niche and note all of the current ads. Most of the ads that appear on a regular basis, month after month are all for a specific product or type of product within that niche. A micro-niche. If that product or ad remains in the magazine month after month than people are buying that product and their IS a market for it.

Now you have some ideas to research. Go online and check out how much competition their is in that micro-niche. Do the keyword research to be sure that the keywords you are targeting are going to be keywords you can dominate or at least get a high page rank for. If it looks like a good micro-niche than you need to create a product for it, or see if their is a good affiliate program already in existence that you can promote until you can create your own.

Another way to find your next niche is to go to Google Trends and note the top searches. Then go to Ebay Pulse and see what is hot and write that down too. Now go to Clickbank, Commission Junction or any other affiliate marketplace you can think of and see what the hottest selling products are on each. Is there any common factors between all of these sources? Write that down.

Get on Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool and see what keywords people are specifically searching for in the notes you made. See if there have been any good search terms that have a high volume and low competition. Just because there are some hot items out there doesn’t mean all of the best keywords are saturated with competition. Sometimes they are and that means you look for more micro-niches or a twist on what ever is already there.

If you are an expert in any of those niches and somebody else has a hot item out there, you can either become an affiliate and promote theirs or study their offer and see if you can improve it. Take the customer’s perspective and see if something is missing. If they are not hitting the mark, or you think you can do better, than do it. You have your next product idea.

Take action and make it happen. Remember that any idea, whether it is good or great, is useless unless you take the steps that are necessary to bring it to the marketplace, before somebody else does !

To Your Success,

Randy Drummond

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Micro-Niches, Niche Marketing, Planning And Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.