Profit from Niches for Newbies (and not so newbies)
One of the worst fears for many newbie online entrepreneurs is that they’re going to devote countless hours and some money toward succeeding in a niche, only to have it fail. There are some steps you can take to ensure you’re targeting the best niche for profit potential.
If you follow these basic guidelines, then you should be able to formulate a plan of attack that helps you consistently earn from your investment. This is one step many newbies quickly and foolishly rush through.
Many simply look to others to see what they’re doing and try to follow along in their footsteps. This is a recipe for disaster, and you have to be more careful when building an entire business based off of someone else’s insight.
Many people will tell you that you need to be passionate about you're writing - you don.t but you will get to the point that you hate writing about something you are not really interested in. However, you don't have to be an authority either you can write about a journey. You can learn and write about what helped you on your journey.
You Can’t Profit If You Can’t Stick with It
Being an effective and successful online entrepreneur requires a love of learning. Your audience doesn’t want to have to go out on a fact-finding trip every day. They’re relying on you to do that for them.
It requires consistent and frequent content creation on your part to convey the information you find. That includes facts and details about the niche as well as strategic tips and advice, warnings and more.
You’ll create content they can devour by blogging to them on a regular basis. You want your blog to become the hub of information they can turn to whenever they need advice or insight about the niche.
On your blog, you’ll be giving reviews on products, detailing strategies they can implement for success, and answering their questions as they come along to show you’re listening and that you care.
You’ll also need to create social networking posts. These don’t have to be as frequent or in-depth, but they should help you engage your target audience about the niche. You can employ the use of text, images and videos to get noticed on various platforms.
Be sure to figure out where your niche is most prevalent and in demand. Look at social media sites and apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, and more.
Over time, you’ll need to have enough expertise and information to help you with product creation so that you can become a coach. with a high-end product.
Evergreen Versus Trend Niches
There are two different kinds of niches you can target for increased profitability. In fact, some have a little of both elements to it. You’ll want to consider getting involved in an evergreen niche that has trend (or fad) profit potential for best results.
An evergreen niche is one that is relevant for years or decades. A trend niche is one that comes and goes. Sometimes, it reoccurs in the spotlight, but sometimes it’s a one hit wonder.
The hybrid niches are those where it’s mostly an evergreen niche overall, in a broad sense, but it has offshoot topics that arise that are more trend-based. So let’s cover some examples of all three of these ideas.
Examples of evergreen niches are things like gardening, survival, weight loss, relationships, parenting and more. All of these have been around for years and years and show no sign of ever going away.
Trend niches are things like the grapefruit diet or in the older days, when cigarettes were touted as a healthy activity. With relationships, usage of a dating app might be a trend, while the basic fundamental tips for seeking someone you share interests with don’t change.
A good way to think about hybrid niches are to start with an evergreen base and then think of the trends that come and go within those niches. Take gardening for example. Gardening of all kinds is a popular topic.
But now you have container gardening, hydro gardening, and vertical or tower gardening. You can have a site built for the gardening evergreen niche, but then take advantage of the spurts of interest shown for certain aspects of it that arise from time to time.
Of course, you can simply separate the two – having one site for the evergreen niche topic and others for the trends that emerge, but that’s not necessary. If you ignore trends completely, you’ll be missing out on a lot of profit potential they can deliver.
When a huge spike occurs for a specific aspect of that evergreen niche, it’s okay for you to veer off and bring that audience into the fold. Over time, they may take your advice on the evergreen topics and also follow some of the later trends you announce.
The problem with targeting trends alone is that, even though you may see a spike of income from them initially, they eventually fade out somewhat and don’t earn you as much as you would bring in covering a broader topic.
If you can have the best of both worlds, you’ll be maximizing your profit potential and not closing the door on any income you might be able to benefit from.
Single or Dual Profit Potential
The next thing you want to consider when thinking about which niche to pursue is whether you want to target a single profit niche or one with dual income potential. First, you need to know the difference.
There are two ways you can earn from a niche. Digital is one way. Digital profits can include things like eBooks, video courses, subscriptions, coaching, and other products that are downloadable or online-oriented.
Tangible profits are the second way to earn money in a niche, and this includes anything where the customer purchases an item and it’s physically mailed to their home or office.
So you could definitely target niches where one or the other is how you’ll earn. For example, a good digital niche is online marketing. People buy courses and coaching to learn the ropes.
But with tangible niches, you’re ordering things. So a good example of this might be toys or home décor. These are items your audience needs to have in hand to benefit from, so you can make reviews and recommendations on what they order.
Some people find digital products easier to review. They can instantly download them to write about them. Or, they may be able to secure review access as an affiliate and not have to pay for the item to review it.
With tangible products, you’re certainly able to review it with information that’s out there, but you won’t have it in hand to try out yourself unless you buy it. So the investment may be bigger for you.
One thing you may want to do is target dual profit niches. These are niches that have the potential for both types of earnings – digital and tangible. So let’s look at a few examples of these dual niches.
Weight loss is a good example. People are always buying subscriptions to plans online, courses that teach them what to do, coaching and more. Those digital profits can add up nicely.
But there are also many tangible items you can promote. Those would include small and big ticket items, like food and weight scales, water bottles, treadmills, dumbbells and more.
Another good example is survival. People want to know how to prepare a run a homestead, so they purchase many digital courses on how to do that – for everything from food storage to gardening to safety and protection or electricity off the grid.
But they also will need to buy the things to carry out those instructions, so you can promote tangibles as an affiliate – like mason jars, canning and dehydrating equipment, shovels and solar gadgets.
Combination Crossover Niches
Another great profit-pulling concept when it comes to niches is to consider crossover combo niches. This is when you have a niche that will pair well with another completely separate niche.
Now we’re not talking about gardening (broad) versus container gardening (narrow). We’re talking about two completely individual niches that have a lot in common. This way, you can bring in an audience that’s big and wants to buy twice as many products – from both topics.
Let’s consider some examples. You might want to get into weight loss. It’s a niche with enormous profit potential. Who needs to lose weight? Diabetics. Diabetes is another separate, big niche.
The two pair very well together and your site about weight loss for diabetics can cover all sorts of things – many different strategies of losing weight as well as management for their diabetes diagnosis.
Let’s take another example. Survival and gardening. Gardening is a big niche on its own. But so is survival. When you pair the two, it expands the number of topics you can cover as well as the number of items you can promote.
Another example might be sleep and stress relief. Both niches are good for digital and tangible promotions, and they pair well together. You can cover endless stress relief concepts and recommend products, and help them achieve optimal sleep in the process.
Stress pairs well with many different niches – sleep, weight loss, parenting, exercise and more. How can you determine if a niche you’re interested in has good combination potential?
Start with one niche and brainstorm topics that can affect it or how that niche can affect other things. For example, if you wanted to go into the anti aging niche, think of what aging affects – your sleep, your weight, and so on.
You can pair that original topic with one of the other two. You can often find these clues on the covers of magazines. For example, on the cover of Women’s World magazine, there was a headline that said, Over 40 Belly Fat Cure, which tells you that age is a factor and weight loss is, too. Pair them for a weight loss anti aging site and increase your income potential!
Search Volume and Profit Potential
Some niche audience members aren’t hungry to buy products – they’re just seeking information, like how to bake fluffy cookies. They already have the cookie sheets and convection oven.
But you can seek out information using things like keyword tools to see what kind of profit potential there really is. You want to avoid freebie keywords – where they use the “free” keyword to find information.
Some niche keywords have high volume but aren’t geared for online marketers. For example, the golf niche is profitable, but the keyword phrase “tee time” in the golf niche – while it has a lot of searches, is not someone who is seeking your site to buy something.
You want to look for buyer keywords you can target in the niche. Some will literally have the word buy in them. But others are more targeted to seeking a solution, not a specific product.
It will be up to you to guide them in what products they may want to consider as a solution for their needs. Never worry about competition when it comes to keywords. If your content is good, you’ll naturally be using plenty of long-tail keywords to get traffic coming your way.
You just want to use tools to see if the audience for that niche is seeking information online in enough volume that it makes sense for you to dedicate time into creating content for it.
Choosing a profitable niche is just one small part of the equation. There are many elements that go into succeeding online in any niche. Picking the right niche is no guarantee that you’ll make a success out of your niche site.
But it’s one of the first steps you need to ensure that all of your efforts don’t go to waste. You also have to pick the right business model. Do you want to be an affiliate only or pursue product creation?
Do you have a desire to do coaching for your audience? That may make a difference in what niche you choose or how much profit potential you can extract from it. The one thing you should never do is choose a niche just because someone else is doing it.
It doesn’t matter how much they’re earning or what they’ve done to get there – make sure you pick something that’s right for you.
Read about 6 profitable niches for 2021
Recent Comments
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I may or may not have taken notes as I read your post. WOW! I have such a broad Niche and I feel it is an Evergreen niche to begin with and it has MANY branches. You have been such a welcoming support since the minute I said "hello". I have made it to the training to create my web page but I want it to be a good url and a good name that's catchy and that covers my broad topic and all its branches. It is something I can write about daily for the next, God knows how many years, until it is stopped and people actually see the truth about what is going on in our home turf and in our world. You are an amazing help and I will never turn down your advice or support on this journey. Thank you so much!
Kendra you will never ever have to worry about my help . I will help you in any way I can and your cause has to be brought to the public attention. Especially by someone who cares. To start with I wouldn't worry about monetization just write from the heart and let me know the URL and I will write loads of comments. The world needs someone like you NOW
That means the world to me so much. I legit just got goosebumps. Thank you. I will for sure do that tonight. THANK YOU!
Hi Catherine,
What an insightful article. Thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Will definitely look into expanding my Niche as a Dual Profit. Sounds like it's a No-Brainer.
Again, thank you for the Post and hope you don't mind me Following you as well. Like my Network to be full of Like-Minded people.
Have a wonderful week.
Regards,
Chris
#CarpeDiem
Hi Catherine,
This is excellent and very to the point.
I particularly like the "paired niche" idea. My OEC website is on kitesurfing for beginners (I'm a kitesurfer with 20 years experience).
My MMO Bootcamp website is aimed at freedom seekers and I've been toying with refining that down to kitesurfers/surfers/other nomad types looking to be financially and geographically free to do what they love most.
I could then have articles on the kitesurfing site linking to the MMO site maybe.
It would have to be subtle so as not to lose the core kitesurfing audience though.
Sorry.....you've got me thinking aloud!!
Catherine, this is an exceptional blog post!
You have given a thoughtful and detailed perspective on what is required to choose a niche and how to navigate setting up a model for your online business.
It is EXCELLENT and MUST READ for all of us, not just newbies.
I am currently working on the second stage of my business and this confirms the plan I am about to implement.
Thank you!
Thank you!
Thank you!
Cassi
you are very welcome and thank you for those wonderful words, as always you light up my day
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Thank you Catherine for suggesting this article you wrote. Wow, 15 years, congratulations! I hope I still have 15 years left to give to this endeavor. I can only hope and pray the time and effort I put in will help sustain us in the future. Hopefully you won’t mind me bouncing things off of you from time to time.