If you followed the links I suggested to you in Part 2 of this series, you should hopefully have a nice selection of niche markets in which you could potentially make money.

(Don’t worry if you’re still short of ideas, the free resources I’ll show you in this post will help you generate even more ideas.)

Next, we need to see whether a potential niche is likely to be profitable or not.

How are we going to do that? By finding out roughly how many searches are being made in the search engines for a particular niche, in any given day or month.

There are several free resources you can use to do this. The first is Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. You simply enter a starting keyword or keywords, and the tool will generate up to 100 related keywords, and most important of all, will give you an estimate of their daily search volume.

Doing a search on “photography” returned over 80,000 searches a day which contained this word… although perhaps not surprisingly, over 20,000 were for “female photography” and another 10,000 for “female breast photography”.

Using this tool we can find more ideas for niches, and also see how popular particular niches are. For example, “digital photography” was searched for about 800 times a day, “stock photography” about 500 times, and “wedding photography” about 500 times

I also noted other potential niches, such as…

black [and] white photography (960 + 922 a day)
glamour photography (931)
wedding photography costa rica (250)

You can also use this tool for find more specific niches within a niche. So we could enter “digital photography” into the search box, and find out what keyword terms people are using.

This time, I got back over 3,000 search terms, which included “digital photography” itself (830), “canon digital photography” (204), “digital photography tips” (200), “digital photography magazine” (106) and “digital photography tutorial” (100).

That there are over 3,000 people a day searching for something about digital photography, and that some of them are looking for tips, tutorials and magazines is a good indicator that there is a potentially profitable niche here.

Tip: You want to find niches that return at least 1,000 searches containing those keywords if you’re considering becoming an information publisher in that niche.

While it’s possible to make money in the smaller niches, larger niches give you much more opportunity to partner up with others to make money.

There are other useful resources you should know about, so let me list them, including Wordtracker’s one that we just used:

Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool
Keyword Discovery Free Search Term Suggestion Tool
AdWords Keywords Suggestion Tool
SEO Book Keyword Research Tool

The AdWords tool gives you suggestions for other words related to photography (which can give you get more niche ideas), and also how much it would cost you if you were to advertise on their network for those keywords. (At the time of writing, I’d need to be paying $2.97 a click to get the top ad position on Google for “digital photography”!)

A word of caution: keyword research is just a guide to finding potentially profitable niches. Some niches are hard to find using keyword tools, and besides, just because large numbers of people are using certain keywords, doesn’t mean they’re necessarily willing to spend money.

Are magazines being published in that niche?

Another way to tell if a niche is potentially profitable is to see if magazines are being published in that niche. Since magazines cost money to publish, they’re only going to be published if there are paying readers in the first place.

To find many published magazines, you can go to Magazines.com and search, or look for a specific category related to your niche. For instance, they have a “photography” category, and I could find 14 magazines there, with some niches including “outdoor photography”, “american photography” and “digital photography”.Also check your local news store for magazines, since some may be published in your country or region that aren’t listed online.

It may also be a good idea to read the magazines related to a potential niche, and see what products are advertised there. If you can get hold of a few back issues, look for products that are being advertised repeatedly, as that’s a good indicator that the publishers are making a profit.

In the next post I’m going to show you how you can create an information product. In the meantime, what did you think of this article? Do you know of any other methods of finding out whether a particular niche is profitable? Feel free to leave a comment below.