How to Find a Profitable Niche For Small Business Owners

How important can finding a profitable niche be, anyway? If you are a new business start-up, it's pretty darn important.

Got to be? Yes, got to be!

Why? Because what's the point of going to all the work of starting up a business that you're passionate about if it isn't going to make money?

Finding a profitable niche is a numbers game. It requires some brainstorming, exploration, and analysis. Nothing too complex, though. You just need a spreadsheet and some time.

A profitable niche is defined as something with a high demand and low competition that can be sustainable over time. Are you ready to get started? To find your profitable niche, follow these steps:

STEP 1: Decide upon a broad category. Let's say "horses", for example. Now, brainstorm a list of things that people pay for when it comes to horses, such as:

* Horse feed 
* Horse boarding 
* Horse training

STEP 2: Brainstorm a list of things people finance when it comes to horses, such as:

* Horse barns 
* Horse trailers 
* Ranch property

You've now generated two different categories of niches: what people pay for and what people finance. These two categories will yield the strongest potentials for a profitable niche because they are based on what people want and what they are willing to pay for.

STEP 3: Check for trends and relevancy. There are many ways to do this. One of the more popular is the Gtrends tool at worktracker.com. Gtrends does two things:

1. It helps you identify the keyword phrases that are most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors.

2. It determines how many competing sites are using those keyword phrases, thus helping you to identify phrases that have the greatest traffic potential.

Go to Gtrends and input the list of keywords you brainstormed in the above two steps, one by one, into their free keyword tool. The tool will generate a list of keyword phrases that you can click on to drill down further into the list and a graph icon to click for more information.

Click the graph icon and you will see two things:

1. The number of pages in Google that contain the keyword phrase.

2. The approximate number of visits that the number one ranking site receives a day.

The number that we are focusing upon for this step is the second one: the number of visitors. Beside each of your keyword phrases, write down any number that is above 100. Exit wordtracker, when you are done compiling these numbers.

STEP 4: Check out your competition Here is one of the simplest ways to do this. In the Google search field, type in the word allintitle, followed by a colon, followed by a space, followed by your specific keyword phrase in quotation marks. It should look like this:

allintitle: "keyword phrase"

Hit return and look at the number of searches that shows up in the blue bar. This number represents the number of results that have your keyword phrase in the title. This number gives you a good idea of how competitive your keyword phrase is.

As a new business start-up, you're looking for low competitive keyword phrases where you can be a big fish in a small pond. For new business owners, this number is around 1,000. Input your entire keyword phrase list and write down the number beside each of your phrases.

Next, reenter the keyword phrases into the Google search box, this time without allintitle and the quotation marks. This will yield a much larger number in the blue results bar. Write down the page rank and names of the first 20 sites that show up in the results. Next, visit the first 10 results and see if they are really related to the keyword phrase. Jot down on a separate piece of paper what they are selling and for how much.

STEP 5: Make a decision. Take a look at your keyword phrase list. Which keyword phrases have a high relevancy (number above 100 from Step 3) and lower competitive rate (number around 1,000 from Step 4)? Do you have a keyword phrase or phrases that look promising? If so, chances are, this will be a profitable niche market for you. Testing the profitability of your keyword phrase is the next step.

Finding a profitable niche takes time, knowing what you're looking for, and where to look. Follow these five steps to find the keyword phrases that will most likely yield you a profitable niche one where there is money being spent and in which you stand a very good chance of getting highly ranked. Although the process can be time consuming, it can make the difference between new business start-up failure or success.
Interested in learning more about how you can make sure you've found a good niche? One that you're passionate about, will keep you interested, and can make good money for you? Then get instant access to your own free PDF copy of "Doing What You Love: Multiple Streams of Passion" at: http://www.SuccessfulSmallBizOwners.com

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