Ecommerce has taken the world by storm over the last decade. Traditional brick and mortar businesses are rapidly switching to the online market to save costs and to make communication with their customer base easier. Online businesses have capitalized on customers’ desire to save time shopping and have made huge profits as a result.
The next phase has been for businesses to shift away from selling general goods to finding untapped niche markets online. That is, instead of trying to sell anything and everything under the sun, the strategy has been to find products that have a high demand and for which there is little competition. This is done by researching keywords that are queried on major search engines.
So, how do you find the niche that will be most profitable for you? There are plenty of tools to help. Here we’ll go over some of the best options and strategies to find your niche and get your online business off to a running start.
Google Trends
Google trends is an analytic tool to see what keywords have been searched for on Google in the past. The database has searches ranging from 2004 to the present laid out in a graph format that’s easy to understand. It also shows where certain search terms have been the most popular, and it suggests keywords and search terms related to the ones you’re researching. Best of all, this tool is completely free to the public.
Related categories can be broken down not only into search queries that are related to your term, but more broadly into topics that users are interested who searched for your term. For example, if you look for trends related to a search for green tea, you might find that coffee is a related topic that people are interested in.
Search terms can also be filtered by one of three types: top, rising and breakout. The top category lists terms that have been searched most often throughout all time. Rising queries are those that have been seeing more searches than usual recently. There is also a third category, breakout, which refers to searches seeing an enormous surge of searches lately. You have to be careful with the breakout category, however, because these searches are sometimes bubbles. They can also be the start of new trends, but you should do further research before you jump on any one of them.
Amazon
Amazon is another great tool for market research. Amazon has kindly ranked all of its items by popularity, so the thing is to search for broad categories and gradually narrow them down to a niche that is profitable but mostly untapped.
The first thing to do is to search for a broad topic. This can be done by browsing the categories list on Amazon’s homepage. Then, you can choose an item that interests you. Scroll down the item’s product information, where its popularity will be listed within the category that you chose. You want this number to be as low as possible.
Sub categories are listed on the item’s page as well, so you can browse between all of them until you hit a niche that seems to be selling well, that strikes your interest, and that is narrow enough for you to capitalize on without facing hoards of competition. It’s a delicate balance, but all the necessary tools are at your disposal with nothing more than a free Amazon account.
Scouting for Trends
This is a tricky method because there are no analytic tools here to be used per se. As you go forward with your research, you will notice certain names associated with your niche that show up time and time again. If you pay attention to the activity of these companies and brands, you could catch on to trends related to your niche. Be diligent in reading blogs, press releases, and any other public announcements of the big players influencing your target market. Valuable information can be found at unlikely sources, so always be on your toes and read carefully.
There are also a number of trend blogs that you can read to determine what’s hot at the moment. This is a quick way to gauge what the public is interested in at any given time. These blogs might not have information about the market that you’re looking into if you’re niche is very narrow, but it might be a good place to start for ideas on a grand scale.
CMS Addons
Once you’ve gotten an idea of the market that you’re trying to enter, you can build your site with WordPress, Magento, or some other content management system that suits you. My preference is Magento 2 paired with MageWorks’ SEO suite. WordPress has a number of great tools as well.
It’s not easy to find the perfect niche. It can take quite a bit of digging, but there is still gold to be struck in the online market. You now have a few tools at your disposal to find the perfect product, and soon the sales will come flooding in.
