Niche Ideas

It can be really tough going when you’re trying to think of niche ideas.  Today, I thought I’d share a couple of things that I do to find niche ideas.

Start With the Basics

Ask yourself questions along these lines:

• What am I passionate about?
• What are my interests?
• What am I good at?
• What do my family and friends say that I’m good at?
• What are my favorite products or services?

Two of My Favorite Sites

I have a couple of favorite sites that I find really useful for coming up with new ideas.  The first is Springwise. Springwise is updated daily with some of the most innovative business ideas from around the world.  It’s a great springboard for coming up with niche ideas.

The second site I really love is Ideasculture.  Ideasculture works with a diverse group of people from around the world to come up with creative solutions to business problems.  The thing I really find useful is they publish a newsletter that usually has exercises in it where you can learn to train yourself to think more creatively.

Two of My Favorite Google Tools

The Google Wonder Wheel is a great tool for helping to think of niche ideas.  The beauty of the Wonder Wheel is that it gives you a choice of terms that are always related to your original search term.

In this example, I’ve used ‘music’.  As you can see, ‘music’ is the hub of the Wonder Wheel and the spokes are topics that are all related to music.

This is how the Wonder wheel generates niche ideas.  You can click on any of the spokes and a new Wonder Wheel will open up with more terms for you to consider.  You can open as many Wonder Wheels as you like.

Google Insights for Search is a fantastic tool for generating niche ideas.  The homepage looks like the picture below.  If you look at the areas I’ve highlighted, you can see that Google Insights allows you to find a wealth of information about any search term you choose.

Entering the search term ‘music videos’,  you can see that Google Insights gives us a graph that shows the interest over time for music videos.  We can learn things like the general trend for music videos.  We can look at the different categories, the news headlines or even add in another search term and compare it against our original search term, ‘music videos’.  Let’s see what else we can learn from Google Insights that will help us with our niche ideas.

Google Insights gives us the top 10 regions where the search term ‘music videos’ is most popular.  I have only looked at the USA for this information, but you can do a world-wide search, a search by country, city, suburb etc.  You can click on any of the top 10, or the map and learn more information.  Google Insights makes it so much easier to find niche ideas.

Pictured below is another fantastic feature of Google Insights.  You can see that it not only gives you the top 10 searches but also the top 10 rising searches.  Again, you can click on any of the search terms to find out more information.

What to Do With Your Niche Ideas

The Google Wonder Wheel is such a useful tool for finding niche ideas because it generates ideas that you may not have thought of.  Google Insights is a fantastic way to find niche ideas because it gives you  an in depth look at what people are searching for.  I find that the two tools work together well.  I use the Google Wonder Wheel to broaden my thinking around my original search term and I use Google Insights to give me the detailed information I need to find worthy niche ideas.

Once I have found some niche ideas, I just put the search terms into the Google Adwords tool to find the monthly search volume.  I also check the number of competing sites for my search term by doing a standard search with Google.

Final Words on Niche Ideas

Next time  I’ll take a look at things to consider when you’re choosing an Affiliate product.  I hope you enjoyed this post and find the Google tools especially helpful in finding niche ideas.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. 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.