Membership Niche Selection Tips
// February 19th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized
In order to make sure your membership business is profitable, you have to select the right market. Here's how.
Step 1 - Find a Fanatical Market
If you want your membership business to be profitable, you have to find a marketing with fanatics in it. Fanatic is defined as someone with an irrational enthusiasm. These are the people you're looking for because they are so enthusiastic they're willing to spend money on their topic of fanaticism. Now that we know what we're looking for, let's talk about how to find them...
- Look at magazine racks. This is an often overlooked, yet extremely simple way to find niches that people are interested in. It's becoming increasingly difficult to run a print magazine. So if you see one on the shelves you know they are making money, which means that there are enough people interested in what they're saying to make it profitable. If they can make money in a print version, you can probably make money with a membership website.
- You've got lots of opportunities every day to see what people are interested in. Just pay attention to what people talk about on the radio, at social gatherings, at the store or restaurants and anywhere in public. If people are talking about it, they are interested in it. And that may also mean they're willing to pay money to learn more about it.
- Again, looking in the physical world for clues you can tell there are lots of people interested in something if there are clubs and organizations around the topic. By the same token, if enough people are interested to hold a convention on a certain topic, you can definitely find enough people to build a membership business around that same topic.
- What about your interests and hobbies? If you're interested in something, it's highly likely others are, too. The icing on the cake here is that you get to build a business doing something you love.
- One simple and easy way to find out what's hot is Google Trends. This service shows you the current most popular search terms. These are the things people are actively searching for in Google. They're searching because they want information. Hot topics that people are excited about make great niches for your membership website.
Second - Analyze the "commerciality"
After selecting a possible niche to build your membership site around, the next step is to find out if it's a profitable niche to be in. The quickest way to find out is to determine if others are profiting in your potential niche.
Here's how to determine if you can make money in your chosen niche
- Are there blogs or forums in this niche? Take the name of your niche and search for "niche name blog" & "niche name forum" in Google to see if there is an active group of people talking about and interested in the niche. This tells you there are people who are actively interested in your niche.
- Search Amazon, Google shopping and eBay to see if people are creating and selling products in the niche. It's a good sign if there are because it tells you people are making money here.
- Watch Google Adwords for a period of time and look for ads the run again and again. Adwords ads are expensive, so people only run them repeatedly if they are profitable. And to be profitable, they have to be selling products and making money.
Last, but not least... How hard will it be to break into this niche?
After figuring out a good niche and determining that other people are making money in it, the last thing to do is decide if you will be able to enter the market. Here are some things to look at to figure this out:
- Figure out what kinds of products people are interested in. If it's mostly physical products, coaching and live seminars, then it will be harder to break into this niche. The easiest membership website to create and maintain are information membership sites.
- The next thing to look at is the competition. You don't want to try to break into a saturated marketing, so figure out how many people are already selling in this niche.
- Size vs. Competition. Some competition is good. It means that this is a profitable market. And as long as the size of the market is large enough to support the competition, you're fine.
- How quickly do people in this market make buying decisions and are the ready to buy? Depending on the market it can be anywhere from a couple minutes to a many months between when someone starts the investigation process to when they actually make a purchase.
Summing it all up
So far, we've talked about exactly what it takes to pick a great niche: One with a hungry crowd of fanatics, who are ready to spend money on information about their topic. And you've determined your barrier to entry is small enough to give it a go. If you've followed along with these steps you're success in practically guaranteed. The only thing left to cover is exactly how to run your membership business...
