Finding A Niche, What’s HOT and What’s Not?…

By Jamie Holt | May 27, 2008 .

Finding a niche to dig into as an affiliate, is somewhat a holy grail for us marketers, After quite a few years of digging new niche’s for options, I have gathered quite a list of available resources from which you can browse at your own leisure ot gauge how popular certain things are. New trends appearing, hot topics, subjects, products, markets in general and what products in particular people out there are really itching for…

Our goal as affiliate’s, regardless of what method we will be using for promotion, is to find a group of people hungry for something and give it to them on a silver platter in return for commission via our affiliate links…

But for us, the whole process starts waaaaaaaaaay before this, it is not, never has been and never will be a case of randomly selecting a product/niche and just jumping in with both feet, especially if you are looking at Pay Per Click as a method of promotion…you could lose your shirt quicker tha you put it on this morning…and even if you are to be using free methods of promotion, SEO, articles etc… you could still be wasting a whole lotta time if you jump with the first product you find and run with it….

I find that my favourite and most successful for me is to look for hot niche’s first, do this in the correct order and you will soon find that it works every time…

Essentially what we need to do is gravitate towards places/sites/reference points that include real life examples of current trends, hotspots and generally updated information from today that shows what is hot and what is not in the world, online or offline, either way doesn’t matter…but what YOU need is to find those hot topics and start to dig a little as to why they seem to be getting so much attention…

I have listed below a few of my ports of call when looking for popular topics/interests and groups of people who are hungr for something, ideally verging on the fanatical a little…

See here for a select few of my favourites

1) Google Zeitgeist http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

2) Yahoo! Buzz http://buzz.yahoo.com

3) http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdf (fresh hot items every month)

4) Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends

5) Amazon http://www.amazon.com

6) Nichebot http://www.nichebot.com

7) Google Groups http://groups.google.com

Magazines.com http://www.magazines.com

All the above are frequently updated and active points of reference for topics, subjects, industries, hobbies and products that are creating a buzz, or already getting big news on a regular basis…

From here you will be able to create a list of 20 hot topics that are current and active… and start digging a little deeper for more towards what options are available within them… more to follow in the next post… stay tuned…

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