If there is one rule, one philosophy, one universal truth about marketing, it certainly has to be this: Sell What People Want to Buy. This one sounds so simple and so obvious, you would think that it would be the primary mantra for all marketers. For the successful sellers, clearly it is. But for the majority it seems to be a truism that has been overlooked. If you are finding success to be elusive, you may have fallen into a common trap - toiling in the wrong niche.

Possibly one of the worst pieces of advice that a fledgling marketeer may be given is the one about finding a niche that you love and sell something for it. This only works if that niche is crowded with willing buyers. And I mean this in relative terms. The niche itself does not necessarily have to be large, but it must contain a high percentage of people who are seeking solutions to problems. When you find that, you have a chance to transfer money from someone else's account into your own. This is a much easier approach than trying to convert the unwilling into buyers. Evangelize to a willing audience.

The Pivot Search

When searching for a new niche, start with areas in which you are familiar. Consider your hobbies, your professional background, your interests. But don't make the mistake of choosing the first area that you find interesting. Use that as a central point for your real search. Pivot from it to surrounding or related areas. Use your own experience as a starting point, but then forget about your biases. Branch out, explore tangents. Pivot search to seek out markets that are busy.

Look for the signs that a dynamic exchange of information is occurring. You might gauge these by the presence of forums related to the market segment. When using forums as a barometer, investigate them individually. Find out how many members each has, and how frequently new messages are posted. The internet is overflowing with special interest forums and has been for nearly two decades. You can safely assume that a topic not supported by forums represents a market you want to avoid.

In the companion video lesson for this report, I explain how you can diagrammatically conduct a search using a specific topic as the pivot. It is your central point for seeking other profitable market segments and is not, itself, the niche you plan to target. It is simply the center for a web of topics you will create.

The Trend Search

Another approach is the trend search. You have no central topic in mind initially. Instead, you look for symptoms of trends using several indicators. Tag clouds for popular sites like Squidoo, Stumbleupon, and Technorati can be very useful. These contain keywords and keyphrases that have seen recent activity on the sites. The relative amount of activity is shown by the sizes of their fonts. A really large keyword is one that has been used a lot by recent visitors. It immediately gives you an idea of the collective popularity of a word or phrase. This might help you identify a central topic for a subsequent pivot search.

Another source of trend information is Google Trends. It provides a more global view of the topics that people are most interested in at any given moment.

The Catalog Search

Possibly the simplest and quickest way to find an active niche is to go straight to a site like Clickbank. Here, people offer products (mostly digital downloads) for a widely spread assortment of niches. The catalog of available products indicates each item's popularity in terms of sales. Thus, pick a briskly selling product and you have found both product and niche at the same time.

This type of search will be most effective if you start with a category you have previously decided on from a pivot search. There are a lot of people using this technique so you should not jump to quick conclusions about the profitability for you. You want to identify those hot sellers that are relatively weakly marketed by others.

Qualify the Niche

Once you have identified a niche of possible interest, you must further qualify it. At this point, you know it is a market segment that is active. Perhaps you have even located a product to sell.

The next step is to determine how well it is being served by competitors. This can be a tedious job but it is one you must perform. Searches on Google and Yahoo should identify the most active sites in the niche. Even if they don't compete in product offerings, they do compete in search engine rankings. Since your own site's placement high in the SERPs (search engine result pages) is important, you must investigate the likelihood of getting that high position for the keywords you will target. For further information on this, please read the Special Report - Keyword Popularity.

A tool I use, and strongly recommend, is MicroNicheFinder, by James Jones. This is a nicely crafted piece of software that mines data, primarily from Google, and analyzes it. It is based on the assumption that you want to identify keywords that can place your site near the top of the SERPs. To do this, it investigates keywords and phrases and indicates which are popular with searchers, but have relatively few competing webpages. This allows you to optimize your own page for these selected keywords and hopefully work your way to the top of the search rankings. MicroNicheFinder is so slick it will even help you find a product to sell on Clickbank. If you are only going to purchase one analysis tool, this is it.

Summary

I've looked at a lot of marketing ebooks. I apologize for putting it this way but frankly, most are crap. They look like they were written by high school dropouts and generally have very little useful information beyond the obvious. There are two, however, that I can heartily recommend. I have studied them both and found many new perspectives that most people are unaware of. Forget all the superlatives and limited-time offers others may use. Either of these will give you the shortcut to success. And yes, I do make a commission on them. But rest assured, I recommend them for one reason only: They give you precise strategies that work!

The Newbie Blueprint - by Dan Molano

Confessions of a Lazy Affiliate - by Chris Rempel

Whether you seek to build a membership site, a mailing list, to sell your own products, or to market other's products as an affiliate, the selection of your market niche is a fundamental concern. Go where the money is. Choose a niche that is active and one in which people are anxious to buy. Identify a problem that really exists, then provide a solution.