Long ago,six blind men set out to find out what an elephant looks like. The first stumbled against its broad side and screamed,”an elephant is a wall!”. The second blind man held its tusk and yelled it’s like a spear! The third held its tail and proclaimed the elephant is a rope! And on and on they went in their misrepresentation of an elephant to the sixth blind man.

I was like one of these blind men of Hindustan in figuring out what a niche is. At first, I thought a niche is a product like Xbox or a market like “weight loss” or even an income source like Affiliate Marketing. It took awhile for me to realise that a niche is identifying a specific audience who share a common bond. The more specific I am in defining this group of individuals, the more effective I will be in helping them.

This blog is for that Wealthy affiliate who has figured out his niche and is about to take the next step.

Before you dive into promoting your niche, you need to make sure that it is worth your effort. You don’t want to spend your time and energy on a niche that will not reward you with profits.

The internet is one colossal pie of 4+ billion people and still counting and our niches are tiny slices of this humongous pie. So how much is your slice worth? It’s important to know from the get-go if your niche is profitable or not because if it is not, you can go ahead and change it. So how do you do this?

Here are five sure-fire ways to find out if your niche is profitable. The first thing you want to decide is:

1 What is the total amount of money spent in this niche?

It is important to know how much money is being spent in your niche because the more money that is spent in your niche, the better your chances of grabbing some of that moolah or at least gaining a toehold in that niche.

So how do you find out the amount of money spent in your niche?

Go to Google Search and key in: Your niche + market size

Please note that if you are in a relatively unknown niche or a sub-niche, you will need to key in the broad niche from which this small niche or sub-niche is derived. For instance if you are in the more specialized niche of ‘Dating for men over 60’, you will need to look for information on “Dating” to access the information you need. Similarly if you are in Yoga, you will look for information in Spirituality. If you are in Dieting or Paleo niche, you will probably look for information under weight loss.

I found this information when I entered “Dating + market size” on Google search.

What this piece of information does is give you the peace of mind that you are in a safe niche with a potential to grow even bigger as the years go by. That’s fuel for your motivation.

Now that you have found out the total worth of your niche, the next thing you want to find out is:

2 Do you have lots of products to promote in this niche?

The more products you have to promote in your niche, the better and the more flexibility it gives you as a marketer. You do not want to be in a niche that has only 3-5 products to promote.

If you prefer to promote digital products, you will head to Clickbank. It is recognized as a juggernaut online retailer with a global presence. Clickbank makes a monthly payout of $1,000.000 to affiliates every month.Go to www.clickbank.com/marketplace, enter your niche idea into the find products search bar, then click “Enter.” If you come across a lot of products to promote, that is a positive sign.

It you decide to promote physical products, then Amazon.com is your destination. Amazon is adjudged to be the “earth’s biggest selection of books, magazines, music, DVDs, videos, electronics, computers,software, apparel.” Go to Amazon.com and enter your niche idea as you did for the digital product. Press ``Enter.” If you come up with lots of products, that’s a great sign.

I went to Clickbank to check out a digital product in Dating and these are my findings

Besides this page, there are 71 other pages of digital products under Dating.

A third test is the search volume per month for products in your niche .

3 Do products in your niche have a high search volume month after month?

Google search has become the no.1 destination for people to look for products, unlike in the past when people did that from the pages of the newspapers. Any wonder that Google search has now become a verb. People now ‘google’ for products instead of searching for them.

Go to Adwords.google.co.uk/keyword Planner and sign up for a free account so you can use the google keyword Tool to search for your niche idea. Enter the main keyword of your niche and any related terms, then click on “Get Search volumes”

It will show basic monthly search results like 100,000s to 1,000.000 per month average monthly searches. All you want to do here is establish that there is a consistently high monthly search in 10’s and 100’s of thousands.

4 Is your Niche Advertisement and Review rich?

The number of advertisements of the product is a metric of its saleability. It costs to place an advert. So if you see a product that has a large number of advertisements,it shows the product is well received and makes money for the affiliates. The number of reviews is also a pointer to its profitability. Only very few consumers of a product take time to write reviews, so if a product has a lot of reviews, it means a large volume of the product is being sold to create such a large pool of review writers.

The fifth and final test is to establish if your niche is a fad or a long term business:

5 Is your niche a fad or a sustainable business with a guaranteed income year after year?

You sure don’t want to waste your resources on a craze with a short shelf life of its own which will show up today and disappear tomorrow. We want to build a sustainable business that will stand the test of time.A business we can sell off some day or hand over to our children.That should be our objective.

To find out if your niche is a fad or a sustainable business, go to Google Trends at google.com/Trends and enter your niche idea.

Google trends uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries over time. If you have a sharply rising graph which suddenly takes a nosedive midstream, that could be evidence of a fad. If on the other hand, the graph is stable or rising, that’s a positive sign.

A rising sign shows a growing business. If the graph is stable, it could be evidence that the business is plateaued for the moment but has the potential to continue its growth in the future.

In this Dating example, the graph shows an upward trend which is evidence of a growing and thriving business.

To ensure your niche is profitable, I encourage you to take time to cover these five bases before you attempt to promote any product in that niche.

Doing so will give you the confidence you need to promote your product in the full realization that there is a demand out there for it and you are in a sustainable business