When selling a product, a lot of people make the mistake of developing their product first, and then trying to find a niche market for it. Of course, the process should be reversed.

Find a market first that spends money, then find out what they want and give it to them.

It is certainly easier said than done, but there are a lot of places online where you can do your market research for free. They’ve done most of the work for you already. You just need to know where to go and what to do to connect all the dots.

Let me show you a process you can go through when trying to brainstorm for ideas.

For starters, you should always be aware of trends and current events in the real world. Try to read several newspapers each day, lots of magazines, both general and niche-specific, watch the news, listen to the radio. Occasionally something that you hear or read will stick with you. You could record your thoughts on a portable voice recorder; jot down some notes, whatever happens to be convenient for you. You could even call your office voice mail and leave yourself a message.

But at some point you’ll have several broad ideas to research, and you’ll want to look deeper. You also want to make sure there is a good market for them before you even think about creating a product.

So you can begin by completing the following steps:

Google Zeitgeist-
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

To begin with, check out the hottest search trends at Google Zeitgeist. Click on ‘Zeitgeist Around The World (Monthly)’ and then if you’re targeting the US market, click on ‘U.S. Zeitgeist’, otherwise look at any of the other countries you might be interested in. At this point you’re just looking for ideas.

If you see that a particular topic is hot, make a note of it and look at more targeted sub-niches later on at more specialized sites (which I’ll show you shortly).

Lycos Top 50 – http://50.lycos.com

The Lycos Top 50 is another site, like Google Zeitgeist, where you review the latest trends and look for hot topics to explore further. You can also look at Yahoo! Buzz for ideas as well (see below).

Yahoo! Buzz – http://buzz.yahoo.com

eBay Pulse – http://pulse.ebay.com

The eBay Pulse site is a great place to start looking at sub-niches. What you do is select the category first (using the topics you’ve gathered from looking at the previous sites), then look for profitable sub-niches by then selecting a sub-category.

The best chance for success is if you are as specific as possible with your niche selection. For example, you don’t want to sell to the “crafts” niche, you want to sell to grandmothers who enjoy giving their latch rug hooking gifts to their families and friends. Whatever. You get the idea.

Also, you should always check the largest stores as well to see what they’re selling. There has to be a reason they are the largest stores. They must be doing something right.

eBay also puts out a report of their hottest upcoming categories based on what their merchandising team has found during their research of trade magazines,  predictions from industry experts and eBay sales data and you can review it at http://pages.ebay.com/sell/whatshot/index.html

Now that you’ve found some potential sub-niches you’ll want to know if there is much of a market to work with, so check back when I’ll go into detail about how you can determine if your sub-niche of interest has real potential.

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Tagged as: internet marketing, niche marketing