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Is Your Niche Too Narrow?

Have you done any marketing analysis? Before you pick a niche, make sure it's a profitable one first. Every now and then, I'll come up with some great ideas. The niche might seem like a winner 3 o'clock in the morning, but until you do some analysis on your niche, don't get too hyped up for nothing.

The other day, I was talking to a friend that has a business selling wine tanks. He just started it up less than 6 months ago and thought there was a highly profitable market for them. He's a wine maker himself and knows a lot of wine makers as well. Also, wine tanks are big ticket items. He sells premium tanks starting at a few thousand dollars. His actual profit is close to $500 for every tank sold.

So, for a quick and dirty way to find out how much he could possibly make from selling wine tanks, let's take a look at Nichebot. I clicked on the Wordtracker option on the top menu and typed in "wine tanks". The top result was "polyethylene wine tanks" which had 14 searches in the last 100 days (according to Wordtracker).

By doing some analysis, I've realized that the amount of searches within a 24 hour period is roughly the Wordtracker count divided by 3.5; So if I take 14/3.5, I get roughly 4 searches a day. So in 1 year (365 days), I would get approximately 1460 searches.

So how do you find out how much you could roughly profit from this niche online? Direct marketing tests have shown that the average response rate is 1%. So assuming you advertised wine tanks online, let's say through pay-per-click ads from Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, you could expect maybe 15 purchases every year. So, that would be a profit of $7500/year ...(15 x $500/sale).

Now that's assuming you were lucky enough to get a 100% of your ad viewers to actually clickthrough. What if only 10% of the viewers clicked on your ad? ...which is a pretty high percentage. Then you would only make $750 for that year.

So in my opinion, this niche would not really be lucrative online (unless you were able to create a viral buzz or unique offer from it). It's too narrow. You would have to add other items to the array to make it more profitable. So I suggested other things that could compliment his sales. Examples would be, an ebook on how to make wine, wine making supplies, wine glasses, wine making software, etc.

Another thing to keep in mind is that online marketing results vary from offline marketing results.

This isn't the definitive way to do niche analysis. It's just a quick and dirty method to see if your wonder niche is a wonder at all.

Once you've found a niche (or possibly other related niches), you'll then carry your preliminary research to full research mode.

Related articles:

Pick a Niche
Keyword Research and Niche Mining

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