6 Steps to Finding an Attractive E-Commerce Niche

Posted: 3/24/2015

E-commerce has given entrepreneurs plenty of opportunities to create successful and sustainable businesses. You can pick a niche of your choice, create interesting digital products and sell them through your website. And if you are targeting a big enough market, the returns can be huge. A digital product could be something as simple as an e-book, a training video or even a podcast series. But to ensure that you sell your products, you need a few things; the niche should be attractive, your product should be awesome and your product should present unique value to your customers.

Why is it important to find a niche for your business?

Finding a niche ensures 50% success of your venture. If you are able to tap into a niche which has a lot of demand, where people are looking to pay for solutions and there is not a lot of competition, you have potentially hit a goldmine. In contrast, if you do not find a great niche, your efforts may not yield the kind of results you are hoping for, which may result in disappointment.

In order to become a successful e-commerce entrepreneur, you would need to select an attractive niche.

We have highlighted 5 steps that will help you select a niche for your business:

Brainstorm Niche ideas. Make a list of areas that you are passionate about. Talk to people around you. Try to figure out if they identify with the challenge that you wish to solve. When you write down ideas, also figure out if you can solve those ideas using digital products. Filter out the ones you think you can solve.
Use Google Trends. Google Trends show how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world. This is a wonderful tool to find out which keyword is in high demand in which country and city. For example, for the keyword “Dog Training”, this is what we get:

United States has the highest searches for this term as compared to other countries. Just for curiosity sake, we dug deeper to find out which city in the US has the highest search trend.

Use Google Keyword Planner to find demand. This is one of the most important steps in your niche finding journey. Go to Google.com/adwords and log into your Google Account. Go to tools à Keyword Planner. There you can change your target area to the geography of your choice. If you are targeting entire USA, change Targeting to USA.

In the “Your product or service” field, type the product that you wish to sell. For example, I typed in “Dog Training Courses”. Then click on Get Ideas. This is what you will get.

Google keyword planner gives the monthly search volume of the keyword you typed in, in the geographic location you are targeting.

It will also give Keyword (by relevance). This will give you list of potential keywords which are closely related to your area. Here we see that keywords such as “Dog obedience training”, “dog training tips” as well as “dog training books” have high search volume. So if we focus on just these 3 keywords, we are targeting 14,000 searches per month in the USA. That is quite a high number to justify selecting this niche.

As a rule of thumb, always focus on a niche which has atleast 10,000 searches a month.

Use social channels to understand customer challenges.

To be successful in business, always listen to what your prospects are saying. Eavesdrop on their conversations, talk to them and find out their pain points. Some of the best ways to do this is to use Quora or Facebook.

I did a Group search on Facebook using the search term “Dog Lovers”. This is what Facebook throws up.

You can join these groups and follow the conversations to understand more about what your prospects are looking at.

Spy on your competitors. This is a very effective technique to find out what your competitors are offering and how you can differentiate your offering from them. I googled the term “Dog training tips” and this is what came up on search rankings.

(source: cesarsway.com)

You can go through this site and a few others to find out what is the product they are selling and what is their unique value proposition.

Check on platforms such as Clickbank. Clickbank is a platform that connects product creators with affiliate marketers. You need to signup on Clickbank and look at offers from other product creators. Find out if some other product creator is offering products on Dog training tips. Look for the “hook” in their products. What is it that they are trying to sell? By having a keen eye on their product offering, you will be able to identify the hook. This is what your prospects are looking for. If you take time to research your niche, you’ll be on your way to success as an online entrepreneur. The above steps should give you all the basics you will need to master the art of niche selection.

Good luck, and keep dominating your niche!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The article was written by Raunak Guha, CEO and co-founder of RankHigher.in, an SEO Consulting Firm in Bangalore. He is passionate about online marketing and creating sustainable online businesses.