5 Indicators To Look For When Evaluating A Potential Blog Niche

Once again, welcome back to Coffee Break Blogging!

Continuing in on our niche selection process, we move into evaluating the market itself and whether it has legs.

What is the most important thing to consider when it comes to competition? What is the #1 most important rule when it comes to selecting a money-making niche?

Also in this episode, we also discuss 5 indicators to look for.

Now, in the last episode, we talked about Part 1 of coming out with a profitable niche idea and that primarily is starting with your own personal ideas and then evaluating your own personal fit for each one of those ideas.

Now the obvious and very important next step is to evaluate any niche idea based upon the market place and really judging whether there is going to be a demand for any of these ideas that you have come up with. That is really, really important because as I’ve said many times now, your own personal interest and passion is really isn’t as important as whether there is a demand for what you have in mind. So with that, we are going to talk about 5 Indicators to look forward evaluating a potential blog niche.

I want to start off first with two very important rules about your market. And it is specifically about competition here.

2 Important Rules About Your Market

 1.You want to go where the money is already flowing.

You are not necessarily going to create a demand for something out of thin air. You are not going to come in with an idea that nobody in the planet has ever thought of before. You need to go where the money is already flowing if you want to create a profitable online business, okay? When you have money flowing, when you have the people that are out there that have this problem that you are going to be solving for them or you are going to give them a solution to something; well, let’s face it, being you are not out there yet, those people are going to go somewhere. They are going to go somewhere to try to solve that problem.

And if it is a really good market, then they are going to be spending money on it already. They are not waiting for you. So you want to go where that money already is flowing. You don’t necessarily want to waste your time; if business is one of your intentions here with going into the market where people are just are not spending any money at all. Okay? It is not uncommon to come up with an idea simply because of your own passion and you think it might have legs as a potential blog, but when you go out and really look around, you know, people are just aren’t spending any money there. They are just not.

I’ve seen this with blogs that have to do with various subjects but with the common theme of how to save money; that is a really hard one to get into. There’s a lot of desire there, however, when you are primarily addressing people who are trying not to spend anything and that is the main unifying factor that brings them together on your blog; it is going to be really hard for you to then turn around and ask them for money. It’s going to be really hard to sell them something if the entire theme of your site is on how not to buy anything, okay? So you do need to be thinking about, again, going to where the money is already flowing.

2. COMPETITION is a good thing.

Obviously, if you are going to go where money is already flowing, there will be people there serving that market already. And that means competition. Now the existence of competition is not a problem. And I don’t want anybody to get stuck (actually) in this mistake of thinking that because nobody else is doing it yet, that you have stumbled on some unique idea. It probably is not true. What probably is happening there is the fact that nobody cares enough to do it. And that is not a good sign.

So you want competition out there. It is actually a really good thing. The challenge to you is going to be how to compete and how to actually standout in that marketplace. Do not run away from it because there is competition. And in fact, I will say this philosophically from my own standpoint; there is really that such a thing as competition on the internet.

The internet is a very, very, very big place and there is room for all of us. Especially for anybody who is willing to go to the work to create an online business. That right there weeds out a lot of people. So, you know, just because there is somebody else serving the same market does not mean that we need to get into this pie based mindset that just because they have a certain chunk of a pie, we’re screwed. It’s just not true. It’s just not true at all, okay?

So with those 2 rules; go where the money is already flowing and competition is a good thing, let’s go in to the 5 indicators of a good potential blogging niche. I’m not going to go super deep in each of these because you could go deep but I just want to touch on them here. If you want more information on these 5 indicators and how to actually go through them, well, I’ve got the course for that over at blogmarketing.com and it is called “Finding Your Niche” and it goes a lot deeper into all these stuff. But for as far as keeping this within the confines of this podcast, we are going to touch on these 5 indicators.

5 Indicators To Look For When Evaluating A Potential Blog Niche

1. Search Volume

Now that is probably not any kind of a news alert for you. If you go out and use one of the various keyword tools and plug in your primary keyword phrase like, “How to fix blah” or “How to do something” and see what comes up and see what kind of search volume you are getting. If you have a pretty high search volume that is actually a good sign. If you just plug that in to Google and see how many search results you get, that is a good sign, too.

Also check those sites out that come up on page 1 and page 2 on Google and find out how much authority those sites look like they have. You want that. You want some sites to be out there to look like they have got some activity going on on them because that is a sign of competition and you want that. Now there is a lot of different tools out there that go into keyword research and again, I go into a lot more detail in that kind of thing inside the “Finding Your Niche” course over at blogmarketingacademy.com.

2. Other Blogs & Sites That Serve the Market You are Looking to Get Into

You want to be looking at other blog and other sites that serve the market that you are looking to get into and you want to look for signs of authority and signs of audience on those sites. And in fact, while you are doing this you might want to keep a list of the sites that you find. Put them into an Excel Spreadsheet or something like that so you can actually go back and monitor these sites. Or even subscribe to them in your RSS feed reader so you can keep track of what they are doing.

But you know, if you go to another blog… well, what signs might there be that there is actually an audience there and a demand? Well, you can look for whether those blogs are selling anything or not? Look for whether they have advertising on the blog and is that advertising actually targeted. I mean, if they are running Adsense or something, they might be running banner ads that don’t have much to do with their blog which is a really stupid idea on their part but it wouldn’t do you a lot of good from a research perspective either.

But if they are running banner ads from companies that have a very close or very tightly related to that space, well that is a sign that there actually is “money” flowing in that space because they are being paid for advertising. Also look at how many comments are being posted because that is a sign of activity on that blog at least. But it’s also a sign of activity on the market in general. So you want to look for other blogs and find out what’s going on out there.

One more trick you can do is to tighten your main keyword or main keyword phrase into Google and right after that, put in quotes “Powered by WordPress” or just the word “WordPress”. And what you’ll do is; in a lot of times you will find sites out there that are about your space or have blog posts related to what you are talking about and then it will be a blog because many people tend to leave that “WordPress” thing in their footer and it’s a good kind of good way to find it.

3. Forums and Social Media Groups

You want to look for forums and social media groups and things like that having to do with the market that you are evaluating. Because when you have those types of things and there is an active community in them, that is a really good sign. So look at forums and find out just how active they look. Look at social media groups in Facebook or LinkedIn and find out again how active the social media groups are. Are the conversations pretty ongoing? Because that is a good sign of activity.

4. Magazines and Kindle books on Amazon

Go on into Amazon.com and you need to look at two things. One is magazines and the other is Kindle books. Here’s why: Amazon is one of those communities where there is knowledge being sold in all kinds of different markets. Now when it comes to magazines, specifically; if there is a company that is publishing a magazine for the niche or the people that you are looking to potentially serve with your new blog, that is a good thing because magazines actually take a fair amount of WORK to publish and they would not be doing that if there were not a market there.

So the fact that there is a magazine serving this particular market and if that magazine has ads in it and if it has subscribers, that would be a good sign. Again, it would not be economical for these magazines to remain in business if they were not an active marketplace there, okay?

Now when it comes to Kindle books, same basic idea. The thing about Amazon and Kindle books is that it is very democratize and pretty much anybody can go and publish a Kindle book now. So if you see a lot of Kindle books on a particular market and there are reviews on it and things like that, that is a very solid indicator that there is a good market there because otherwise, people will not be putting those things on Amazon or you would not have the reviews and there were not the evidence that people were actually buying and reading them. So you want to go to Amazon, look around, plug-in those keyword phrases, see what is coming up in terms of magazines and Kindle books. And if you see a lot of them, that is a good sign and you’ve got a potential market where there is money flowing.

5. Trade Shows

This one you just have to go on Google and look around, but it is the idea of Trade Shows. Trade shows and conferences cost a lot of money to put on. And if there is a trade show or conference that serves the market that you are looking to get into, then it is a very good sign that there is money flowing in that space. A lot of these trade shows and conferences are based on advertiser booths and companies are looking to reach the attendees of that conference. There’s just a lot of money involved there. So if they exist, that is a good thing. If there are no conferences or trade shows that serve the type of people that you are looking at potentially serving, it does not mean you necessarily need to nix it because you have these other indicators to go by. But it is a good sign. Okay?

So, again, those top 5 indicators are search volume, other blogs and how active they are, social media groups and forums, Amazon.com and that is looking at the magazines and the Kindle books selection or just even other books but there’s a lot of Kindle books out there because it is so democratized now and then lastly is the trade shows or conference scene regarding that particular market.

So judge each of the ideas that you may have listed in the prior episode up against these 5 indicators and see what you have come up with. There are other things that we are going to look at on these markets but we really need to gauge whether there is actual activity happening because you do not want to go out there and be the only one. That is actually not a good sign at all. I’m not saying that somebody could not come up with an original idea but for most of us, we are going to need to enter spaces where there are already people out there looking for what we want to provide. Okay?

If you have any questions by the way, feel free to shoot me an email. You can email me at david@blogmarketingacademy.com if you have any questions regarding what I’ve talked about in this episode or the last episode and I will be happy to answer your questions and we can talk a little bit further, okay?

With that, I will see you in the next episode on our series and we will continue on this niche evaluation. 😉