Researching a possible niche is where most people stumble. I know I did when I first tried. What’s something I like to do? Know about? Yada-yada. Most of what I came up with were things I do as a hobby, like photography, the occasional giving of a guitar lesson, wood working, etc. Sure, they were possibilities but I just never could nail one down as a money-making niche.

My research at the time always revealed either a saturation of websites dealing with the niche or they proved to be non-monetizing in reality. I quickly grew frustrated. That’s when I opted to go with Affiliate Bootcamp and learn all that I could learn.

This time around I approached it from the point of trends. Find a trend and then try to match it to what I know or what I can learn quickly. That said, I established my criteria as:

• Be a trendy type of product that bore characteristics of being an item on the market for the long haul.
• Be a product that buyers want.
• Be a product that not everyone and their brother or sister is selling
• Be a product that I could easily keep a blog topic going.
• Be a product that serves some purpose of helping someone; a product that buyers may need.

I began with Google Trends which… to my chagrin didn’t net much.

Then I decided to just go with Google. I searched items like “trends in internet marketing,” “hot trends on Amazon,” and the list goes on. That gave me a lot to work with, to narrow down and the more I researched, the more I was able to see trends develop. Finally, I ended with a search on “what are people buying on Amazon,” and “what are people buying on xyz.”

The results I got back were much broader than the trends research but for some reason the results always provided me with a layering of what was selling on the web. And typically there were three things that seemed to always rise to the top.

Of the three, the one on top of the list was a niche I had never heard of. The other two were things that I was familiar with and had even tried before: computer software and cameras. However, the number one seller had a low average price but a much higher upper range. A quick check of affiliates selling the item revealed a nice overall commission range of 7% to 20% or more!

The number one seller was also a new niche with a promising possibility of being a marketable item for quite some time. People were buying them like crazy and the internet market wasn’t saturated with sellers. The very nature of the item lent itself well to future blogs and newsletters with a variety of topics that could be mined without redundancy.

Lastly, the item was serving a need for kids and adults with developmental disorders. It lent itself well to development of concentration and coordination. Plus, it was just plain fun to watch videos of kids teaching adults to use the item and other videos of adults teaching kids! Even though the medical community rejects the item as a developmental aid, its benefits are far too obvious to ignore. Why would I think it would be any different than other low-cost remedies in medicine? Big Pharm does not like the notion that a $5-$20 aid can displace their multi-million dollar industry!

So now I had a niche that met all of my criteria.

Next Up: Actually Learning To Use the Product