Passion vs Profit: How To Monetize A Niche You Know Absolutely Nothing About

posted on December 6th, 2007

Should you choose a niche you’re passionate about, or choose a niche that will be profitable?

When starting an online business, many people will advise that you to do what you love and the money will follow. But what if it doesnt? Or what if you want to capitalize on a profitable niche, and dont happen to be an expert on the topic? Is that even necessary?

No, it’s not. I’m an expert at being a non-expert, and so in this tutorial I am going to show you how you can make money online in a niche market you know absolutely nothing about…

Passion is great, and you’ll have tons of fun starting an online business doing something you truly enjoy. However, not everyone has a passion… and maybe your passion just isnt profitable as a business model. And let’s face it - sometimes its just cool to tap into a niche and make some money…

As you probably recall, I just set up a new niche affiliate site for musical instruments. I do not play. I do not own an instrument. I have no personal experience and have ZERO knowledge about the products.

Ana asked: Lynn, you just mentioned that you started a site on musical instruments without any knowledge … How are you handling the credibility thing if you know nothing about the topic? What qualifies you to run that site? source

Credibility is an issue if you are offering professional advice, answering questions, or otherwise working directly with your target market.

With most niche affiliate sites, you are not doing any of those things. You are simply creating web pages that lead them to the products they are looking for online. My musical instruments site being a good example.

Rosalind Gardner has many dating affiliate sites, for example. Whether or not she is an expert in online dating, I dont know. I imagine she’s learned a lot about the industry along the way, as an affiliate, though! But her sites are very successful, and she sends her visitors to authority sites within that industry (via an affiliate link, of course).

Where To Start, When You Know Nothing About The Niche

Once you have researched and chosen your niche, its time to develop your website and marketing strategy to deliver exactly what your target market is looking for online.

Obviously I am not familiar with the products or the market, so I wouldnt even know what all falls under the category of “musical instruments”. Flutes, for example, or the different kinds and the various brand names.

Fortunately, eBay does. And that is why I chose to work with the BANS method of creating a niche product-based affiliate site. BANS works directly with the eBay RSS Feed and Affiliate Program and imports all of the products - and product categories - automatically for a chosen niche.

eBay can be a great research tool when it comes to products or markets you are not personally familiar with. They have a What’s Hot section on eBay’s Seller Central where you can get a breakdown of the “Hot Items” by category and subcategory.

Using this chart, you can get a good overview of the types of products that are selling well on eBay, and a good general look at specific niches. Using the products shown in the chart, you can compile a base keyword list to work with for further research as well.

Here is a screenshot of the category I was looking at in the “Hot Items” report on eBay, to show you an example:

So now you know what eBay buyers are interested in, and buying the most, in those niches. Next, you want to find out how that same target market (in this case, people who buy musical instruments) searches for products and information online - at the major search engines.

For this, you can use the WordTracker Free Keyword Tool. You can put in your general keyword (ie musical instruments) and also put in keywords you found in the eBay report (ie: amplifier, acoustic, cornets, clarinet).

Guitar Amplifiers are in the Very Hot section on that report, for example, so that’s just one of the things I’ll look into to get a better feel for my market.

You can take the keyword phrases your target market is searching for, and perform those searches on Google yourself. This is a great way to educate yourself on the market and the products.

Since I already have a product site powered by BANS and eBay (view), I am most interested in what kind of content I can add that would be of great interest to my target market. I want to add content pages that will rank well in the search engines and bring in the type of visitors that like to buy the products featured on my site.

{HOT TIP}
Simply take the keywords you have found so far, and add the word “how” to them in your keyword research.

Going back to my example of “guitar amplifiers”, which is a hot product in my niche, I add the word “how” to that phrase to see what kind of content I can publish on my site. Here are the results:

Bingo! This is how you start mapping out content ideas for your new site, even if you started out knowing nothing about the niche - or what your target market is looking for. You simply continue to research the keywords and micro-niches within your niche until you have created a good solid list of content ideas - and are getting a good feel for your market.

Now obviously I dont know “how guitar amplifiers work”, so I am not going to be able to magically sit down and whip up some great content to put on a web page that answers this question…

How To Generate Content On A Topic You Know Nothing About

My next step in the research phase is to see if I can locate PLR Content. PLR stands for Private Label Rights and is basically content that is already written, that you can buy cheap and then use in just about any way you like.

I just did a quick search on Google for “music plr” and immediately found sources that were around $1 per article. I even found a huge source for free content. I’m well on my way to gathering plenty of raw content at this point.

So my first step is to locate all of the free articles, PLR content, and even websites that already offer the how-to content themselves (I’ll link to them as resources, or use them to learn).

The next step is to get busy editing that content, rewriting the content, or otherwise preparing it to use on your site. You can outsource the task of making the content unique and useful, or you can work on it yourself. You can also hire writers to write unique content for you at very low prices, since you have the topics in hand from your “how research”.

Another great idea is to spend some time in niche forums. Find out what your target market is asking, and also look at the answers. Is there a member that devotes a lot of time to offering useful answers and seems very knowledgeable on the topic? Perhaps you can request permission to reprint some of their tips - or maybe even hire them to write a few how-to articles for you!

With the power of the internet at your fingertips, there really is nothing holding you back from creating an awesome website on just about any topic…

P.S. If you want to do more in-depth market research on your niche, or potential niches, I highly recommend studying Easy Niche Blueprint. This series of video tutorials will show you ways to find hot markets and also figure out where your target market IS online - easily!

For an interesting continuation on the topic of Passion vs Profit, see: Follow Your Passion? The Blogger Roundup. Then return here and put these ideas into motion

Like this tutorial? Blog about it! If you link back to this page in your post, using this URL: http://www.clicknewz.com/1225/passion-vs-profit/ , a link to your post will show up below so everyone can check it out!

Tags: Affiliate Marketing · Internet Marketing

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