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Membership Niche Selection Tips
This article explains how to select a profitable niche for your membership business.
First – Look for Fanatics
The number 1 thing you have to do is find fanatics if you want a profitable membership website. What’s a fanatic? It’s someone who is so excited about a certain topic that they will spend their time and money on information about it. Here’s how to find fanatics:
- Look at magazine racks. This is an often overlooked, yet extremely simple way to find niches that people are interested in. Because it’s becoming harder and harder to keep print periodicals profitable these days, if you see a magazine on the shelves, you know it’s making money. And that means there are lots of people interested in it. If they can make money in a print version, you can probably make money with a membership website.
- Pay attention throughout the day in your regular activities. See what people are talking about on the radio, TV, at parties, in public, etc. If people are talking about something, they probably want to know more about it. Which means you can start a membership business providing information on it.
- Don’t forget about clubs and organizations. If there are enough people to to build a club, there are certainly enough people to start a membership site on the same topic. By the same token, if enough people are interested to hold a convention on a certain topic, you can definitely find enough people to build a membership business around that same topic.
- Think about the things that you are interested in. There’s a good chance that others are interested in these things, as well. And, as an added bonus, it’s much more fun to build a business around things you’re interested in.
- Google Trends. This is a great way to figure out what people are interested in. Google Trends tells you the most popular current search terms. These topics are the hottest topics because lots and lots of people want information about them. Hot topics that people are excited about make great niches for your membership website.
Step 2 – Determine the financial feasibility
After selecting a possible niche to build your membership site around, the next step is to find out if it’s a profitable niche to be in. One way to figure this out is to see if other are making money in it.
Here’s how to determine if you can make money in your chosen niche
- Are there blogs or forums in this niche? Take the name of your niche and search for “niche name blog” & “niche name forum” in Google to see if there is an active group of people talking about and interested in the niche. This means there is a large group of people already assembled for you to market to.
- Search Amazon, Google shopping and eBay to see if people are creating and selling products in the niche. If other people are creating and selling products in this niche, it means there is money to be made.
- Watch Google Adwords for a period of time and look for ads the run again and again. Adwords ads are expensive, so people only run them repeatedly if they are profitable. And to be profitable, they have to be selling products and making money.
Last, but not least… How hard will it be to break into this niche?
Once you’ve found a niche and figured out that there is money to be made in, you need to determine if you can break into this niche. Here’s how to make this determination:
- Look at the product types in this niche. You want to find a niche where information products are being sold as the norm. The easiest membership website to create and maintain are information membership sites.
- The next thing to look at is the competition. You don’t want to try to break into a saturated marketing, so figure out how many people are already selling in this niche.
- Unless the market is just so big that it doesn’t matter how many competitors there are, you want to limit the competition. So evaluate the size vs. the competition.
- Market readiness. Are people ready to buy? Are the receptive to marketing messages? Depending on the market it can be anywhere from a couple minutes to a many months between when someone starts the investigation process to when they actually make a purchase.
In Summary
So far, we’ve talked about exactly what it takes to pick a great niche: One with a hungry crowd of fanatics, who are ready to spend money on information about their topic. And you’ve determined your barrier to entry is small enough to give it a go. If you’ve done your homework, your business will be a success because you already know your market is a profitable one with room for you. Learning how to run a membership website is a topic for another article…
