How to Find a Niche That You LOVE!

I've used this technique before, but I want to share with the community. It's an easy way to help you find a passion that you love and you make money. It's a process I put together while I was helping coach people through career transitions.

The reason I found this useful, people tended to choose niches that seem to fit them at the surface, but it wasn't enough to sustain them as they spend the long days working on a job, career, business, blog, or otherwise.

My recommendation, use a pen and paper. It somehow works better. It's 15 steps and takes a few days, but it's well worth it. And every time people are grateful for the time they spent.

Creating a Niche That You Love In 15 Steps

Get a pen and paper. Or your favorite editor (recommend pen and paper)

Step 1: Set a timer for 10 minutes. When you start the timer, begin to write down all the things you love to do that you could spend a majority of your time doing. Just let yourself enjoy writing, don’t limit yourself.

Step 2: Wait 1 day, do the same exercise with the same list on the second day. Again don’t limit yourself.

Step 3 (Extra Credit): Do the same activity on the third day. We know, crazy, but giving yourself three days allows yourself a chance to explore what you enjoy. I find that people who let themselves spend three days working on this exercise sometimes figure out what they truly enjoy working on well over people who do it just a single day. It is your decision how much time you deserve to spend time considering your future.

Step 4: Take the list, cross out everything you don’t want to make money at doing full-time. For example, I love to surf and hike, but not something I want to do as a business. I love becoming a millionaire and helping others make money. And I love working on it full-time.

Circle the items you do like that you think you would want a business. Try to get that list down to three circled items before going to the next section. Take the time you need before doing your research.

Learning the customer’s problem

Niches are amazing when it meets up with a customer problem. A problem people find worth spending money to solve. Now it’s time to figure out the types of questions you could answer with your favorite niches.

Let’s use some research on deciding what problems people need solving.

Step 5: Figure out some problems to research. For example, if you like hiking, do some searches for hiking.

• Resources
  • Yahoo Answers: Search your focus, see what questions people pose and the answers people respond. For example, hiking provides problems like breaking in hiking boots.
  • Amazon: Search for the categories. But instead of just searching for products only, read the comments of the products that come up. What are people reviewing, what problems are the products solving for customers?
  • Favorite Social Media: Similar to Amazon and Yahoo, research what problem your niche solve. Another example, say making money. Is it debt or freedom? Making money is a solution to a problem.
• Do this for all your Niches and make sure to document the problems for later research.

When you’ve spent some time researching, try to get 5-10 problems to solve for each niche. If you feel one or two of the niches don’t make sense, cross them off because you ultimately need to decide on just one.

Get ready for competitive research.

Doing competitive research

Step 6: Competition is a good thing. When you look for competition, don’t worry if you find a bunch of companies or people doing what you want to do. Similar to what you did with the previous step, write down what problems they solve for customers. Read the comments on the blogs and posts. Find what the people are saying.

Doing keyword research

Now that you’re doing your research, it’s time to do some keyword search. Keywords are what people use to search for terms to solve problems or buy products/services. When I asked you to write down problems people have, now is the time to use those terms.

Step 7: This is where I love Jaaxy. Feel free to use google analytics or others, but Jaaxy does a fantastic job of helping determine if the keywords I use will get rankings on the first page of google and traffic.

Key things to consider when doing keyword research:

• Long-tail keywords are better (Long sentences)
• Structure keywords that make grammatic sense
• Problem statements work better than generic terms
• More traffic and high competition is worst than smaller traffic and low competition

In the example below, I'm using Jaaxy (we're all familar with it). Let’s use the niche for hiking, and one of the problems found – breaking in new hiking boots.

Step 8: If you haven't signed up, please make sure to explore Jaaxy.

Step 9: Search for “Breaking in new hiking boots.” We’ll explain the terms as we go through the phases.

Step 10: Sort on “Avg.” You’ll need to hit it twice to get the most significant numbers first.

Step 11: Analyze the information.

Here are the definitions.

• Avg: Average number of monthly searches
• Traffic: Visits to your website if you’re on the first page of google
• QSR: Quoted Search Results, the number of competing sites that Google recognizes using the exact term
• KQI: Keyword Quality Indicator, “great” is the best
• SEO: A score based on traffic and competition, the higher the score, the more likely you rank for this keyword on the first page (scale 1-100, higher-better)

Select the “Get QSR” beside the top 6.

Here’s my analyst, the QSR is excellent as well as the SEO for most of these. We eliminated the keywords that didn’t make grammatic sense, even though their metrics seem great. The good news, the first and the “how to” all worked well. That means you could write a blog post potentially named “How to break in hiking boots.” It may have the potential to get on the first page quickly. Consider this for a moment – what if you sold products that helped break in hiking boots? If you’re truly becoming a millionaire, you’ll get the connection. We removed other keywords that didn’t have word “Hiking.” Why? Because if you’re finding a niche about hiking, don’t get traffic that looks for breaking in running shoes. Remember the specific problems rank much higher. Once you’ve established yourself, it matters less (maybe), but we’re like specifics for a greater chance of making money faster.

Step 12: Do research for all your problems, and document some of the keywords. If you use Jaaxy, you can save the keywords to a favorites list. Now go through all your niches and problems to get some sense of if you can get traffic.

Making a decision

Are you ready?

Step 13: Get your niche selected down to two

If you haven’t already, eliminate niche’s that you aren’t ready to invest time and money at the moment. Maybe later, but not now. And now choose select two niches before the next step.

Step 14: Visualize yourself in both niches. You’re about to build a business and make quite a bit of money off a niche if you do the work you have the potential. We believe that instead of a knee-jerk decision, taking a moment and reflecting upon each niche for a moment helps you to make the right choice.

Step 15: Make a decision. Yep, just do it now.

Good luck!