So for my Clickbank business,  I would start at niche research and pay all my attention to it. I will not move any further until I find a niche that meets my requirements. There are thousands of niches, many of them hungry for products, so it only makes sense to set high expectations from a niche to ensure your success. The requirements are the following:

There must be buyers in the niche

The straightforward way to check that is Google’s Keyword Tool, and everybody does that, but you can get sorely disappointed if you only rely on that one. You see, Google tells about generic traffic, it doesn’t tell you anything about commercial intent of the searchers. They may be searching to buy, or they may just as well just be “kicking tires”.

So, to complete the research I would check Ebay Pulse, Yahoo Answers. The former is obvious – people search on Ebay to buy, so if there are your target niche related searches, you’re good. Yahoo Answers is a extra trick to really get into people’s minds. What do they want to find searching for those terms? That’s an easy way to find out.

There must be other products already selling

If there are no other products selling in the niche, that can mean two things – there are no buyers or the market is still untapped. While the latter is possible, it is a lot more likely that there are no buyers, and the risk is too expensive to take. Check Google for ads – the more you see, the better. Check Clickbank marketplace – the more high gravity products you see, the better. Competition is a good thing, unlike many “less successful” marketers would tell you. You can “borrow” techniques from your competitors, piggy back on their success, address their weaknesses in your products. None of that would be possible without the competitors and you would have to do a lot of expensive guessing and testing.

There must be bestselling books on Amazon

Amazon is huge, it’s a monument for e-commerce. And if they are selling something well, you can be sure there are millions of buyers out there in the niche. So check if there are books in your niche that sell well, that have great reviews and ratings. This is also a great way to discover new niches.

There must be a magazine in the niche

There will be no magazines in a dead niche. If a magazine is published in your target niche, that’s a sure sign of interest. Not only you know there are buyers, but you can see what their interests are from the topics covered by the magazines. You can check them at magazines.com

There must be high ticket products or recurring subscriptions

This especially applies to Clickbank Marketplace products and it’s easy to research them. Clickbank shows you if a product is recurring, and if you see any of these in your niche, it’s a very good sign. People have money and they are willing to pay membership fees.

Even better if there are high ticket products ($1k and up) – that means people are willing to spend a lot of money in this niche – it’s a gold mine. You can find these products by simply looking up the merchant’s name in Google to find their suit of products.

The gut feeling

Last but not least is something hard to measure. The best niches are those that have an emotion attached to them. If the buyers look for products in the niche to solve their emotional problems, their ilnesses, or otherwise find a solution for their crisis, they will buy anything. It’s a powerful thing. If you can locate a niche where emotions play the main role, and you can help these people, they will buy anything from you without you even trying.

Those are the key characteristics of a great niche to be in. There are really a lot of such niches, so it is only good sense to select them over less potential niches. Always make sure your target niche meets these requirements and your business success will be almost guaranteed.

A typical niche product and website creation process consists of:

• Niche research, finding a hungry niche, evaluating its potential
• Create a product in the niche
• Creating a website, a sales letter, follow-up sequence, to market the product
• Getting traffic, affiliates

Each step is a topic on its own, so I will cover each in my next posts. For now let me explain why each step is important and how each step fits in the business plan.

Niche research is the foundation of a niche business. Finding a right niche can make or distroy your business. It’s important to find not only a hungry market but one that has little competition. Failing at this step renders the rest of the steps to be a waste of time and money. The tough part is that you don’t always know if a niche is a good niche from start. A good way to test waters are affiliate programs, and you should always look for other products in your niche before creating your own.

Creating a product may seem like the toughest part of the business, but it’s really not. A great way to dumb down the process of product creation is to survey the niche audience and ask which questions are most important to them – answer those questions and you have a product. Alternatively, you can get inspiration from Amazon books in your niche. You don’t have to buy those books either – most give access to the table of contents and that’s all you need to hire a researcher to find a bunch of articles from all over the Internet. Then a writer to rewrite those article into an ebook.

A sales letter is what will sell (or not) your product. While a typical product converts at 0.5%, a great sales letter can improve that dramatically, though it depends on a niche greatly. For example, prodcuts that solve a particular urgent problem will convert better as a rule, as well as those who have an emotional moment to them.

Traffic is the blood of any online business. So you need to make sure to have it aplenty, but targeted enough at the same time. Affiliates are what turn a few buck business into a million dollar bussiness. Therefore in this step, getting affiliates to promote your product is the main focus, albeit you can and should be getting traffic yourself.

Well, in August you’ll get a chance to get your own niche business in a box. It’s called My Clickbank Business and it’s all about providing you with absolutely everything you need to run a business selling niche products from Clickbank. It’s as if you’d hire your own programmers, designers, ghost writers, SEO specialists only at a much much lower price.

It has was never done before, but Andrew X and Steven Lee Jones has come up with a solution they can provide at an affordable price. They have tested a number of products and websites to deliver only what works for you to make money with.

My Clickbank Business will include:

• High quality niche products you can sell
• Completely designed websites with a sales copy that sells
• Free product you can give away to build your list
• Autoresponder sequences to build relationship with your list
• One Time Offer sales copies and products
• Traffic strategies to get the traffic you need
• Affiliate offers to get affiliates to sell your product

The package is versatile and easy to use, all you have to do is install it on your website and start bringing traffic and selling. The copies will be limited, obviously in order to prevent duplicate products and websites to keep the maximum profit to the members.

The product goes out on August 11th – mark your calendar if you’re interested.  If you ever wanted to create your own product but didn’t find time or energy to create it, this is something that you will find cool.