Finding Your Niche

When people talk about niche selection, they put the biggest emphasis on specificity. They focus on narrowing things down.

Now, don’t get me wrong. That’s definitely something you should do. But that step comes later.

Before you begin, you want to focus on “selling what sells”.

There are big, massive, evergreen niches where there will always, always be a market full of people itching to break out their pocketbook and pay you for solutions to their problems.

Now, these niches have some pretty important things in common. And I think it’s worth talking about those things.

What is it about these things that make them so perennially profitable?

It comes down to basic human desires. Love, sensory pleasures, material wealth, self-confidence, social success, self-actualization. These desires are basically universal, at least within contemporary Western culture.

They revolve around things that people want on a very deep and fundamental level, in ways they’re not necessarily even fully aware of.

Love and friendship. For the most part, humans want to find a romantic partner with whom they can share both emotional and sexual intimacy. Someone to love them and support them.

Social success. People want others to like them. This ties into things like beauty and getting in shape, although that also relates to the desire to find a mate. It also ties into self-help topics, like how to be more confident, how to get better at public speaking, etc.

Material wealth. Good old “how to make money.” Whether it’s investing in real estate, starting a small business, or whatever, people are always looking for ways to make more money. Again, this also ties into the concept of social success.

Entertainment. People like to have fun. They like humor. They like to laugh. They like to read about celebrities or whatever, vicariously reveling in the sumptuous glamour and sexy scandals of the rich and famous. A lot of late 20th century sociologists and thinkers wrote about the concept of the “culture industry.” Think of that kind of thing.

Self-actualization and personal fulfillment. People want to feel content in their lives. They want to find a sense of peace with the immanent reality of their own existence. They want to find ways to create meaning and infuse their lives with a sense of purpose that makes them feel complete.

As I mentioned, there might be some cultural variance here. I am not a psychologist, nor am I a sociologist, nor am I an anthropologist or a historian. Someone more knowledgeable on these subjects might be able to weigh in here.

So, here’s a list of the specific “mass market evergreen niches” I’m referring to. Each of them ties into at least one of the general human desires I was talking about above.

• Mass media

• Diet and weight loss

• Fitness

• Self development

• Cooking

• Dating and relationships

• Gaming

• Making money

There are more to this list. But what’s important here is what these niches have in common: an appeal to basic, deep-seated, universal human desires for things like love, acceptance, wealth, and meaning.

So these things are evergreen. There is always money to be made. You might be thinking, “Aren’t these super saturated and high competition?”

Sometimes, but they’re also massive and broad. There’s plenty of room in these markets.

You might not actually need to narrow your niche down as much as people seem to think you do. After all, go too niche, and you’re faced with a limited market. Sure, you might make some money, but you’ll hit a ceiling.

Anyway, the key to pinpointing a subniche is to focus on answering a specific question or solving a specific problem.

“How do I lose weight?” is a big thing, but it’s not necessarily super specific. There are a lot of ways to lose weight. There are also a lot of reasons for losing weight, and a lot of different subsections of the population of “people who want to lose weight.”

The way different groups go about losing weight is going to be different. Their specific problems are different, and they’re looking for different things.

So let’s say you want to write an ebook and sell it on Amazon Kindle. Now, you need a specific problem.

So what’s an example of a specific problem? And how do you go about looking for them?

You can find them by doing some keyword research, something you can read more about here. It’s not just for SEO — it’s also a way to get a peek into what your audience is thinking.

Whether it’s on Amazon or Google, you can learn a lot about what people are asking and where the demand is at by checking out what comes up with the autocomplete feature.

You can also check out resources like AnswerThePublic.com to find these questions, or use a tool Keyword.io which actually draws from Google’s Autosuggest feature, so it’s a quicker way of getting that info than doing it manually.

Either way, you’ll find queries and searches like these, which are what you want to focus on.

“How To Lose Weight Without Diet And Exercise?” “How To Draw For Kids” “How To Lose Weight Journal” “How To Cure A Migraine”

Sometimes they’re actually phrased in question format, and sometimes they’re not but you get the picture.

Hone in on these specific questions and searches. Then, offer your audience a specific answer.

Whether you’re putting together a buying guide for protein shakes or you’re writing a series of ebooks about weight loss and getting in shape, you can maximize your profits by offering a specific solution to a specific problem.

This advice might not be applicable in every single case. But if you want to make some extra cash online, in a way that revolves around informational content, this strategy has worked time and time again.

Edited from u/steviedrive