Welcome back to The Big IDEA – and Week 4!

We’ve spent the last two weeks focusing on the “D” in IDEA, Define Your Community

A huge part of determining if our Passion can be a Profitable Niche for us is this Definition process. It’s HUGE!

And over the past week I’ve had a number of people contact me and say, “Greg, I don’t have any idea what my Passion is, or what my Profitable Niche is.”

So, let’s take a step back and look at some additional tools that can spark our creativity, and lead us to that elusive Profitable Niche!

One thing we can do is piggy-back (likely a uniquely American phrase meaning to ride on the back of) on the work of others. Producing printed books is a costly process – publishers, the people who produce these written works, spend a lot of money up-front to print and distribute copies of these books to the booksellers. Books are heavy, so even the shipping is expensive.

It makes sense that these publishers do their research before they invest that kind of money – they determine if the book they are about to print is something people are looking for, that people will buy. They evaluate if there is a Community looking for this particular subject.

This is what Niche Research is all about!

Are there, then, any book publishers we can look to that might shine a little light on what might be a Profitable Niche for us? Indeed there are – let’s look at two.

http://www.dummies.com/

http://www.idiotsguides.com/

How about a quick joke – A company decided to spend enough money to make their product Idiot-Proof. The only problem was, every time they did, someone made a better Idiot!

Now, both of these companies produce good books on a wide variety of subjects. The “Dummies” guides are likely the best-know brand, but they are both working in very much the same space, the same Niche of bookselling.

Personally, I prefer the way the “Idiot’s” guides are written of the others – my wife just tells me that makes me more of an Idiot than a Dummy. Whatever!

Whichever of the publisher’s sites you choose or if you look at both of them, they will both help you by providing many, many topics that are likely Profitable. Remember, they wouldn’t produce the book if it wasn’t going to sell – if it’s going to sell, then there’s a Community of people looking for it – if they’re looking for it, it is likely a Profitable Niche.

Just browse through the site… click on the navigation (as of this writing it’s on the left-hand side of each site) on something like “Health & Fitness”. There are books on Pilates, Fat-Burning, Workouts and Hair Color.

Under “Hobbies & Crafts” there are Coin Collecting, Holiday Crafts, Scrapbooking and Antique Collecting.

Take your time, browse through any or all of these, and find one that you connect with, one that you are Passionate about.

Then, you can return to the Google Keyword Tool we talked about last week, and find out just how many people might be searching for your new Niche online.

Next week, I’ll give you one additional way to do some research – and that is to have someone else, someone very skilled at this type of thing, to do the research for you!

Until then, please leave me a comment below or drop me an e-mail with your questions anytime.

Kindest regards,

Greg

PS - Have you heard of my good friend and mentor, Chris Farrell?  Chris has an amazing community where he trains beginning marketers - and you can see the amazing offer he has for my friends by clicking here!