Finding and Dominating Profitable Niches: How to Hit the Bull’s Eye?

Blogging is a big business today that spreads over a vast market. For bloggers, this is a way to monetize their skills and earn a fortune. From cosmetic products to fitness equipment, this form of marketing has taken the blogging business by storm. What could be more alluring than earning money by writing a blog?

For potential bloggers, the million-dollar question is: what are the profitable niches?

Let us guide you…

Let’s say you are a food blogger writing for food experts, dietitians and food vendors. Addressing problems of this audience is one thing and earning money by writing on a specific problem is a different story.

What you need to know is how you could attract the profitable businesses in between the broad lines of your industry. In the food blogging, for example, writing only about nutritional benefits of food will not do any good for your blogging business; rather you need to write on the problems of your audience to get their attention.

Assuming that you have built a fundamental familiarity with the idea of niches, let us guide you more on the topic with the following 6 insightful tips:

Find Your Audience

First thing first.

Just like a business, blogging is only profitable when you identify the people who will read your blog. These are the people you will be directly benefiting from your knowledge.

Do not just take a generalist approach to identify your audience and rather find a finely-grained audience to reach the bottom of the funnel.

Let us guide you with the following questions:

Who are your target audience – What is their age, gender, socioeconomic background, religion and geography.

What are their interests – What are their likes, dislikes, hobbies and indulgences.

What are their online activities – How they interact with businesses through Google, Twitter and Facebook.

Drilling down to your specific audience will help you identify their problems and attract right business to redirect traffic from your blog.

Get Into the Problems of Your Audience

Now that you know your audience, the next step is to find out their problems and how they affect them in their lives. You need to take a methodical approach here. Here is what you need to do:

Research About Problems of Your Audience
The old practice of market research has taken a back seat, now you have online platforms to get insights into your audience. Online communities like Quora, Yahoo Answers and Stack Exchange are some good platforms where you can know problems of your audience.

Whether it is about their issues, interests or dislikes, you can press the emotional buttons of your targeted reader on these ‘question and answer’ websites. Once you know the granule details of problems of your niche audience, you need to know their most pressing problems they need an immediate help.

Find Out their Profitable Problems

Learning about problems of your niche audience is just tip of the iceberg and it is not enough to get you in front of your audience. To dominate your niche, it is important that you search for their grave problems that they want a solution.

Fortunately for bloggers, technology offers a number of tools that can help you dig deeper into the problems of your audience. What you need to do is create a list of topics related to problems of your niche audience that you can analyze using one of the keyword analysis tools, such as Google AdWords.

This tool by Google provides you a list of most bankable keywords you can use in your write-ups. However, you need to keep an eye on the competition of your selected keywords. Make sure that there is a moderation in number of searches and results of your chosen keywords.

Create Content That Your Competitor Can’t Beat

When you embark on blogging industry, you need to come out as someone your audience can identify with. Let’s say you are a professional academic writer who writes on a topic, such as ‘Why You Need Someone to write your dissertation?’ You have two ways to go about it.

Either you take a traditional approach and offer the typical ‘how-tos’ and ‘tips’ to your audience or you can make it more expressive by demonstrating the topic with an e-book, infographic or a tutorial video.

TechCrunch is a good example of how you can use videos to augment your points. In this blog, the blogger publishes video tutorials to explain a process to readers. So, the readers have more descriptive information to understand their problem and its solution. This is particularly helpful if you are running a blog, so you can pitch one of your products to solve a problem.

Leverage From Hottest Topics in Your Industry

Online audience has a quest for new information regarding their problems. So, if a breakthrough product claims to solve their problem, they have the internet facility to quickly search sources for its validation. Keeping yourself updated with trending topics is the quickest way you can dominate the market and stay ahead in the game.

Google Trends is one such tool you can use to find the hottest topics within your specific industry. Taking help from this tool will enable you to have insights on latest products in your niche that you can write product reviews and get instant income as an affiliate marketer.

Tap Into the Mobile Market

Mobile traffic is increasing by days. As a blogger, you need to refocus your strategy to mobile-friendly websites to have an edge over your competition. According to Google, 94% of Americans use a smartphones to search about local businesses making mobile audience the primary targets for affiliates.

What you need to do here is rebrand your online identity to make it more apt with your mobile audience. Make sure that your blog and other websites are fully accessible for mobile traffic.

Similarly, if you are running an affiliate marketing program, you should engage with bloggers who run a mobile-friendly website in order to gain mileage of increasing number of mobile customers who prefer buying from a smartphone or tablet.

Bonus infographic:

Infographic source: NicheHacks.

Blogging is a profitable only when you can influence your niche. With the above-mentioned 6 expert tips you can establish yourself as an authority and engage in a profitable venture with affiliates.

This article contributed by Katherine Szalay.

Top image credit: shutterstock.