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When I started my internet marketing journey in late 2005 I had a problem of seeing niches. I cannot see in anywhere that there is a niche other than internet marketing, web hosting or ebooks in the clickbank, not to say niches that I am passionate about.

Now I think I have a process to generate niches.

Checklist:
1. find my niches through expertise, passion, pains & meanings
2. find my niches through life processes
3. find products at amazon, ebay, clickbank, CJ, dummies, wiki, etc.
4. find keywords for SEO, market and competitions
5. find community for special knowledge, needs and key to success
6. for content find articles, youtube video

1. Find my niches through expertise, passion, pains & meanings

a. My experience/ expertise,
Accounting, Malaysian tax, finance, investment, reading and analysing financial statements, costing, Chinese Mandarin, Malay Language, Excel, etc.

Sample niches: teach investing, reading financial statements, Chinese language, Malay language, excel VBA, etc. Making money through etrade affiliate, newsletter on following stocks, teach Chinese or Malay languages, sell language courses, sell Excel software, VBA scripts and books, etc.

b. My passion,
Computer, Internet, Writing, Reading, History, Economics, Finance, Mathematics, NLP, Psychology, Conspiracy Theory, Photography, Kayaking, Travel, Buddhism, Mysterious things, i.e. Poltergeist, etc.

Sample Niches: selling courses, books, of all the above, i.e. speed reading courses, internet and computer books or software, photography of using my canon xt rebel, etc.

c. Pain / Personal or family disasters
Have panic attacks twice in life time and never develop into disorder, sample niche is anxiety disorder.

Solving your acne problem, haemorrhoid problem without surgery, how to go through PTSD, online dating for those single with children, etc. (not me)

These niches are the solutions.

d. Meanings in life

Anti CNN for lying, then create a community to fight against evil CNN and earn…adsense(?), start Black Ink Project (not me, but JP), a local community site, Tibet for peace and true autonomy not war and independence, etc. Off course, yoga, meditation, etc.

Finding niches from passion and experience is probably a “soul searching” process.

2. Find my niches through life processes

a. when you are getting married, you will be the expert of: wedding gifts, wedding ideas, wedding books, wedding speeches, wedding cards, wedding greeting ecard, books on relationship, wedding dvd, wedding flavour, wedding photograph session, wedding gown, wedding planning, wedding music, wedding cd, etc.

b. when you are not pregnant, you will be passionate of how to get pregnant, how to choose gender of baby, etc.

c. when you are pregnant, you will become expert of choosing prenatal class, baby gifts, tips to handle baby, music for baby, how to deal with baby, baby sickness, post natal depression, baby car seat, etc.

d. when your baby getting older, you will know: baby toys, card game, board game, dealing with children, gameboy, PS3, etc.

There can be many ideas for other phases of life, change job, moving home, going to school, going to college, joining sport team, childrenpsychology , learning science, buying cars, buying home, loan, mortgage, finances, starting a business, getting a pet, pet training, pet food, dating strategies, how to make love properly, travel,backpack, etc.

Going through wikihow.com, amazon, ebay, wiki, etc.

Last, and the least important, those content subscription services usually gives tons of niches per month. And off course, there is a niche a day’s free newsletter (! important: the web site is pretty annoying due to pop up).

Format of products, books, dvds, cds, toys, games, music download, software, services, gadgets, equipments, etc.

More discussion about finding niches at Black Ink Project forum.

Comments(1)

Notes on today’s Black Ink Project webinar session: Rock Solid Plan

1. Focus on a slice from a big pie

2. SWOT Analysis

Strenght
usable site? indepth content (just be better)? product selection? expertise (become authority)? difficult replicate site idea (wizard)?

Weakness
Lack technical skills. lack design skills, not a good writer, not knowing as much as competitors, don’t have the money to execute the plan
(PHP scripting, time, bad taste of web design, bad english, slow writer, etc.)

Opportunities
Market trends, sales increases, lack of competition, competitors weaknesses, macroeconomic factors (like buying music method from CD to download)
(ultr portable notebook)

Threats
Savvy competitors, your angle is covered, too easy to copy/ replicate, macroeconomic factors
Is my service special or simple microsite?
* Gedgets come and go, go for the flagship model of a brand with future route map.

(build a real web site, start with a small piece and not taking too much)

2. Dig deeper - Market study
a. can i produce the site?
skills? what do i have, where can i get
tools? free tools, etc.
time?
budget?

b. Who are my competitors?
ultra portable competitors (PC world, Cnet, notebook review)

c. is there enough demand?
using google adwords keywords tools
just brainstorm and come out with a list of possible keywords
what are people looking for (in the ?
any niche with a publication worth a niche. ?)

3. Understand the customer

4. Is your angle unique?
add value? value clear in customers mind? key differentiators?

5. Discuss ideas with others
Trusted colleagues, subject matter experts, don’t worry about them stealing your idea.

Comments(0)

I thought for a while after the webinar session, the first step of an internet business is soul searching…

Find my niches that I have experience, passion and with niche shoppers community, and not lucrative niche that I have neither passion nor expertise.

Experience and expertise of a topic allow me to create USP for my web sites. With passion on a topic, I can learn quickly and put in effort even though I may not be an expert yet. With passion I can become expert and create USP easily in my niche. It is in the details. Not the brute force of massive high cost PPC.

With such USP I can carve a slice out of a big pie. No niche is too difficult or competitive. Compete against the big boy is down to how good I am in a niche, how focus I am in a niche and how much effort I am willing to put in to improve and become top notch expert. Not head on against big boy but slice out a small piece of the big pie. Generalist earns less than specialist.

Then, enlarge a small pie.

Jeremy also gave the characteristics of good niches and bad niches. Join the project here and watch the webinar video. Kurt’s blog has a much better & complete summary of the first session on finding your niche.

For my photography hobby, I should focus on the niche of one camera, i.e. Canon Rebel XT, instead of trying to build a camera store. After a while, when the niche is running alright then expand to comparison of cameras.

The first step of an internet business is indeed soul searching…competency and passion. Actually I have two more factors, pain (like how you solve your heamoroid problem) and meanings (injustice of CNN twisted reports done to both Tibet and China).

What is my expertise and passion? Next post.

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In mid 2006, I bought QuitYourDayJob.com’s High Performance Affiliate Marketing ebook by Jeremy Palmer. I applied his
ideas of a converting (sales) web site. Together with scripts that I used, I managed to do rather well in PPC marketing.

In mid 2007, Jeremy and Anik started PPC Classroom. Despite steep fees, I bought the program. The limitation of this program is that it focus mainly on PPC marketing. PPC’s landscape is changing constantly. Competition has become fiercer. PPC search engines algorithms change constantly and demand more efforts from advertisers. Simply PPC is not sufficient.

Today, Jeremy is starting Black Ink Project to help new affiliate to make profit. As described in his post.

The Black Ink Project is an affiliate success course designed to help new affiliates bridge the gap between my e-book and making a profit. Some find that the book and forum support is all they need to succeed, but others need a little more hands-on training to connect all the dots.

The project focuses on four key areas:

• Setting realistic goals, based on your time and budget. You’ll discover how much time and money you need to invest to achieve your goals.
• Researching prospective opportunities. You’ll learn out how to avoid potential pitfalls and find the right niche and the best advertisers.
• Learning the software, scripts, and tools to help you create your site. You’ll not only leave the course with a complete tool belt, you’ll learn how to use your tools alone and together to create beautiful high-converting sites.
• Develop and launch a campaign from start to finish. At the end of the course, you’ll have a complete action plan and checklist you can use for future sites.

The project is free for everyone to join. The initial 1,000 seats was quickly snapped up. However, registration for the Black Ink Project is now open again for another 2,000 seats (Limitation of WebEx’s meeting), when Jeremy got WebEx’s commitment to add another 2,000 seats to conduct webinar.

My personal recommendation is to ask you to join the program. It is free. You have all the experts gathered by Jeremy to guide you through the process of turning ebook knowledge to profitable internet business. Other than your commitment to complete the project and to help & share your success story with others, there is nothing else asked of you. Check out the content of the program at Black Ink Project website. You can register for the project here.

After your registration. You will need to register for the first Webinar. Read this on registration of webinar. The first webinar will be started on 5/5/2008 3pm PST (or 6pm New York time, 10pm London time, 6/5/2008 6am Singapore & Malaysia time, 6/5/2008 10am New Zealand time.) It left less than 9 hours from now. More information available here.

I will record my notes, thoughts, ideas and progress of Black Ink Project in this blog. I will reveal my niche and progress. Bookmark this blog and keep an eye here.

You can join the Black Ink Project community at twitter.

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