Finding Your Niche In Information Marketing

By: Carl Pruitt

Before beginning to sell information products online, make sure that you are targeting a niche that will be profitable in the short-term as well as in the future. Your niche is simply a different way of saying your target audience.

Some niches, you will quickly discover, are not as profitable as others. You need to put a lot of thought into whether your target audience is both willing and able to spend money for the solutions to their problems.

For example, golf is a very expensive sport. Typically golfers have money to burn if they believe you can help them improve their score or beat out their friends (competition) on the links.

Another potential target audience such as single moms on a budget may be reluctant to pay $67 for an eBook on getting organized, but if you target a different problem of theirs they are willing to pay. For instance, many may be willing to pay $47 for an eBook which teaches them how to make more money working at home than they make on their 9-5 jobs.

A good place to start exploring your target markets is with online groups and forums. You can find many at iVillage, Yahoo, Google or Boardtracker and determine which groups have the most interest. Men’s pages such as AskMen might give you some insight into the information needs of this group that might be provided at a profit.

You’re not just looking for a broad group of people to cater to – you’re looking for those with a lot of problems. When you start creating your information products, you’ll want to build an empire of products that all focus on the same niche, allowing you to market to existing, loyal customers who buy from you time and time again.

In some instances, you’ll find a large niche market and then realize you need to develop your information product line around a more targeted, narrow section of that niche. For example, parents are a group with plenty of problems you could potentially address. Raising intelligent kids, saving money, preventing drug and dealing with discipline, use might be a few.

But you can then narrow that niche to moms or dads and dig deeper by focusing on parents of multiples or parents raising kids with physical ailments. Just remember that an information product is not really a product at all – it’s a solution, so it needs to be marketed as something that will improve lives