This article explains how to select a profitable niche for your membership business.

Number 1 – Discover Niches with Fanatics

The first step in developing a profitable membership business is to find a market with fanatics in it. 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 it, they are interested in it. Which means you can start a membership business providing information on it.
• Conventions, clubs, and organizations. Once again, if there are enough people interested in a topic to create a club or organization, then there are enough people to build a membership business around it. 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.
• And of course there are all the things you have an interest in, too! If you’re interested in something, it’s highly likely others are, too. And, as an added bonus, it’s much more fun to build a business around things you’re interested in.
• Another fantastic way to discover what people are interest in is Google Trends. Google Trends tells you the most popular current search terms. The reason people are searching Google for info on these topics is because they are interested. And the fact that it’s made it into Google Trends tells you LOTS of people are interested. Hot topics that people are excited about make great niches for your membership website.

Next – Figure out if there’s money in it

Once you found a potential niche or topic to center your membership site around, you need to figure out if you can actually make any money in it. An easy way to determine this is to figure out if anyone else is making money in this niche.

OK, how do we figure that out?

• Find out if there are blogs or forums related to it. Just search Google for “YourNiche blog” & “YourNiche forum” and see what comes up. This means there is a large group of people already assembled for you to market to.
• Check Amazon, eBay and Google Shopping to find out if others are making and selling products in your niche. What you’re trying to figure out is if anyone is making money in this niche, and if people are selling products it means they are making money.
• Look at Google Adwords for the same ads are running over time. If people are running the same ad over time it means they are making money in the niche. They would not continue to spend money on the ads if there were not making a return from them.

Step 3 – Determine ease of entry

OK, so you found a hot topic and you know other people are making money on it. Will you be able to get involved and do the same? How do you gauge the ease of entry?

• Figure out what kinds of products people are interested in. If it’s mostly physical products, coaching and live seminars, then it will be harder to break into this niche. Membership websites based on information are the easiest to start and maintain.
• 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.
• How ready is the market for marketing messages, and how willing are the fanatics to buy. Some niches are made up of people who require lots information and have a very long lead time, and some markets are filled with people who will spend lots of money right now.

Putting it all together

At this point you’ve figured out what niche you’re going into. You found your fanatics, you know they spend money and you’re confident there’s room in the market for you. If you’ve followed along with these steps you’re success in practically guaranteed. The only thing left to cover is exactly how to run your membership business…

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