Free Tools to Help You Find a Hot Niche!

Selecting which niche you are going to go into is super important. Why? Because no matter how much hard work you put into setting up your business, if you pick the wrong niche, it will be all in vain!

Don’t set yourself up for failure. Take the time to pick the right niche. Here’s 4 things you need to look at when picking a niche to go into…

1. Find a niche that is hot

A hot niche is one that gets a lot of attention. It’s a niche that people are really passionate about. A good example of a hot niche is dieting and weight loss.

How can you tell if your niche is hot? There’s a few good ways.

Firstly, find out how many global searches your niche’s main keyword phrase gets. The way that I do this is by using a free keyword tool called Market Samurai (unfortunately, this tool is no longer available as of March 2022).

Once you’ve downloaded your copy of Market Samurai and opened the program, you’ll see a window something like this:

 

Note: Your version of Market Samurai may look a little different to what you see in the screenshots. This is normal as Market Samurai is constantly being updated.

Click on ‘New Project’. You’ll see a ‘Project Settings’ window something likes this:

 

Next, type in the keyword in the niche you’re targeting. For this example, we’re going to type in “weight loss” in the Keyword field. After you’ve done this, click on the ‘Create’ button to continue.

You’ll then see the following window:

 

The section we’re interested in is ‘Keyword Research’ (on the top left-hand side). After you click on that button you’ll see a window something like this:

 

If you don’t have an Adwords account, you can sign up for a free one by clicking on the ‘I don’t have an Adwords account yet’ button. Follow the prompts to create and submit your Adwords login details into Market Samurai.

Market Samurai needs you to have an Adwords account so that it can gather the correct keyword data from Google. Once you’ve successfully entered your Adwords login details into Market Samurai, you’ll see a window something like the one below.

You can add more keyword phrases, but for this exercise, we’ll only do the research for the keyword phrase “weight loss”. Click on the ‘Keyword Analysis’ button to continue (see below).

 

You’ll then see a window like the one below. We’re only interested in how many searches the keyword phrase attracts so we can untick all the checkboxes and leave just the Organic > Total Searches checkbox ticked.

Click on the ‘Analyze Keywords’ button to continue.

 

For the example of “weight loss”, the global monthly searches for that term is 11,100,000. That’s a lot of searches!

Any keyword phrase that gets over 300,000 global monthly searches is a hot niche.

A common concern I get about hot niches is, “Isn’t there too much competition already?” The answer is a big NO! There’s always room for new blood in any hot, competitive market. Time after time I hear of newbies that came into hot markets and are able to grab their lion share of the profits available.

A classic example of this is Facebook. It came out of nowhere to become the number one social networking site in the world, blowing MySpace out of the water!

But you don’t even have to grab a ‘lion’s share’ to be extremely successful. Even if you only got one-hundredth of one percent (0.01%) of a $6 billion dollar market, your business would be bringing in $600,000 a year!

2. Pick a niche that you’re passionate about

Being successful in ANY business is about passion. It’s no different in the online world. For your first niche, it is highly recommended that you pick something you’re passionate about or at least have some interest in.

A lot of work is involved in setting up a successful business, and if the niche you’ve selected is not something you have an interest in, you will find it harder to do what is required.

After you’ve been successful in your first niche, and you want to go into other niches, then feel free to pick something you’re less passionate about. Especially if, by that stage, you’re outsourcing most of your work anyway.

3. Make sure your niche is evergreen

The last thing you want to do is build your business around a niche that will not be around for the long term.

Imagine you built a business around ‘making money with Twitter’. You would have done really well with this back in 2007 and up until about 2010. Nowadays everyone is raving on about Facebook, Kindle publishing and selling brandable physical products on Amazon.

A more clever approach would have been to pick a more general topic like ‘make money online’ or maybe ‘make money with social networking sites’.

Common sense will tell you if a market is evergreen, but another good indicator is if the niche has magazines dedicated to it. This you can find out my searching Amazon’s magazine section or even your local newsstand.

Good examples of evergreen niches are:

Weight loss
Weddings
Share Trading
Dating
Forex
Parenting

4. Make sure your niche is monetizable

You might find a hot niche you’re passionate about that is evergreen but the question still remains, “Will this niche make me any money?”

An accurate way to check if this niche is monetizable is to go to Google and do a search for your niche’s keyword phrase. If the search results page has lots of Adwords ads (these are found on the top of the results page and to the right of the page) then this is a niche that advertisers are willing to spend money on.

This means that they are making money in this niche.

Okay, let’s do a practical example. If I go to Google and do a search for ‘clay trinkets’, here’s what comes up:

 

No advertisements at all.

Why? Because there isn’t enough of a market for this niche or not enough money in it.

Now let’s take a look at the example of ‘weight loss’. If you do a search on Google for ‘weight loss’ you’ll see lots of advertisements (see below):

 

Now that’s a HOT niche!

What do you do when researching a niche? Leave a comment below!