Top Research Ideas For Your Niche Product

The fundamental mistake made by many niche marketers is they create products based on what they think people want to buy. The correct way of deciding what niche product to create, is to find out what people are actually buying at the moment.

Here are five ways of discovering ideas for niche products which you can sell to make money:

1) Use Forums

With the rapid expansion of the internet, forums (or discussion groups or bulletin boards as they are also called) have proliferated. There are forums hosted all over the internet based on practically every theme imaginable.

Forums are websites where like minded people gather to discuss all sorts of issues pertaining to the theme of the forum. Some of the well moderated forums are extremely active and a good place to conduct research.

When it comes to finding ideas for niche products, you need to use the search engines to locate a number of forums on the theme you are interested in. For example, if you're interested in needlepoint, you could enter needlepoint+bulletin board into the search engine.

Visit each forum and find out what questions people are asking. In addition, find out how many times similar questions are asked. The more frequently a question is asked across a number of forums, the more likely you have found a topic for your next niche product or website.

2) Visit Your Local Book Store

If you are completely stumped for ideas, a visit to your local book or magazine store is in order. People who are keen on a hobby almost always subscribe to related magazines, and if they buy magazines there's a good chance they will buy niche products.

Your task is to discover what magazines are being sold and how quickly they move. It is best to visit a number of stores and compare the common magazines sold in all of them. Try to find out from the sales assistants how many copies they sell of the popular magazines you have identified.

A magazine sold in great number by each store, month after month, is a sure sign of a profitable niche.

3) Investigate eBay

eBay is one of the biggest, if not the biggest single market place on the planet. Millions of people buy a gigantic range of products month after month.

Go to eBay.com and scroll down the left hand menu, click on "All Categories" and scroll down to the bottom of the page that opens in your browser until you get to the section titled "Other Ways to Browse". Included in that section are four sub-sections, each being ways to conduct your research:

i) eBay Keywords (popular terms being searched for)

ii) Common Searches

iii) eBay Pulse (a daily snapshot of current trends)

iv) Popular Products



From these four you will be able to spot a multitude of popular ideas for your next niche product.

4) Survey Your Website Visitors

If you have an existing website which receives a fair bit of traffic, you can survey that traffic using a popup. In order to entice people into taking the survey you will have to offer some kind of reward. You could even offer extra rewards for people who refer others to your survey.

Normally any web survey you conduct would have to be of a similar theme to your website, but it is possible to conduct a survey to find out your visitor's interests and whether they would be prepared to spend any money on their interest.

They key is to ask simple questions in a manner that won't lead your respondents to any particular answer. When designing your survey, keep in mind you will have to analyze the data and draw conclusions from it. This means keeping your questions "on topic".

The simplest surveys to analyze are those constructed with multiple choice questions. The disadvantage of this is you don't know for sure that the answers are absolute or close (i.e. "second best").

5) Survey Your eMail List

If you have your own email list, you could survey them to find out what problems they are currently facing, or what interests they have. People on your email list will tend to answer more truthfully because there is a degree of trust between you and them.

This degree of trust not withstanding, you will still have to offer an incentive for your subscribers to take the survey. Design your survey the same as you would for a popup on your website.