One of the more enjoyable tasks for me as a marketer is niche market research. ( I know, I know; Mom and Dad said the same thing!) It’s perhaps just the fun of digging around and discovering hidden little markets you can target that is exciting.

So much of the niche marketing business model involves technical aspects like setting up blogs, sites and writing supporting content, as well as all the promotion that goes with it, that when you get to go on a treasure hunt, it’s a welcome break.

To manage good niche market research, set aside some time, a clear mind, and perhaps some tools. This kind of keyword research can be done for free, and indeed that is where most of us start. However when you want to scale this in any meaningful way, you’re going to need some power tools.

But for now, let’s look at how we can find profitable niches  for free!

The first thing to decide is on a market. Many times you hear  people tell you to market your passion. Well, if you’re building niche sites for a living, very soon you’ll be out of passions! I’d personally rather focus on giving hungry markets what they are looking for! Health, wealth and relationships will always be at or near the top of the list as far as consumer demands, so start there. Some great places to find niche markets include looking at Amazon, eBay and Google Trends. Each has features that will tell you what’s hot now, an in the case of Amazon, even offer you affiliate solutions to boot!

Once you’ve found a market, (and hopefully a product you can sell within that market) we want to dig down and find keyword phrases that are getting a decent amount of traffic, but are not overly competitive. For me this means at least 1000 searches a month, and less than 100,000 competing pages. Your numbers may be different. You can pry this info out of free tools from Google, or other free sources online. Or, if you don’t feel like spending weeks doing that much work, give either Market Samurai or Micro Niche Finder a try. Both give you more useful information than you can possibly use, and in minutes.

Beware of spending too much time researching and not enough time putting your plans into action. Understand that nothing happens until something moves!