So how do you research a niche to determine if anyone is interested in it?

This is probably the most important question you need to ask yourself before you even think about building a business in a niche market. If a niche is too small or if the niche does not use the Internet to buy products, you are going to be have trouble from the start.

Here are a few things EVERY niche market MUST have to make it a potentially profitable one to go after.

1) People within the niche must be passionate about their topic of interest. You can find people like this by searching in google for the keywords "yourpotentialmarket forum", "yourpotentialmarket chat", "yourpotentialmarket club" and so on. You want to find groups of people who regularly visit websites where they can chat among others who enjoy the same topic. (Obviously replace yourpotentialmarket with a keyword from your niche market).

2) People must have a credit card or at least money available to spend. You can spend all the time and energy you want trying to sell ebooks to college kids, but you will be lucky to break even. College kids are notorious for not having expendable cash and you will have a hard time selling anything to them. Focus your energy on markets that have lots of money to spend such as golfers, doctors, business owners, etc.

3) Competitors. If there are no competitors in the market you are looking into, walk..no run, to the next niche market. Do you think you are the first person who has ever tried to sell to your newly found niche market? Think again. 99.9% of the time if there are no competitors to be found for a market, it means there were people trying to sell to them and they failed, thus no longer being in business. A good way to see if you have potential competitors is by searching in google for keywords within the niche you are looking into. If you see a couple of google ads on the right hand side that are selling products similar to what you had in mind, it's time to get excited.

Don't try to be a hero and invent a new product nobody has ever seen before. Instead, look at what is ALREADY selling and find ways to make a better product.

4) Finally, research your keywords. There is a free tool that can give you a good idea of how many people are searching for keywords related to your potential niche market. You can find it at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ Simply enter a few keywords related to your market, and if there are anywhere between 1,000 and 100,000 searches for that keyword per month, you may be on to something. I just did a search for "small dog clothes" and last month close to 5,000 people searched for information on clothes a small dog would wear.

These four steps are the main criteria you should use to determine whether or not you have a potentially profitable niche market. If you go through all four of these each time you research your niche markets, you will have a much better chance of success. As always, once you find a possible "hot" niche market, you will need to build a product to sell to them. Which you can discover in my most recent article "How To Create Niche Information Products At No Cost To You!" http://www.profitattractor.com/art091705.htm