Quick Note: Never create a product that you haven't researched and proven that the market in there. (Large groups of people want and are looking for "your" information, product or service and have the money to buy it!)
Its always better to find out what your niche customers want and create the product from their answers. Then you'll be guaranteed to get sales upon release of your product.
Now, when you first start looking for a hot niche topic you should set aside a day or atleast a few hours for your research. Also do not critize the topics you choose, you should go thru quite a few resources until you come up with about 10 topics. Some great resources to help you find niche topics are:
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Google Zeitgeist-
Yahoo! Buzz-
Lycos Top 50-
eBay PulseAlso ebay puts out a monthly report of their hottest categories
http://pages.ebay.com/sellercentral/hotitems.pdfAfter you find these 10 topics, you'll do more research and find out which is the best one to go with. Just because they are popular, you need to find out if the money is there!Amazon - is a great place to start, if there are a lot of books on that topic, you know the money is there. Try to narrow you niche sub topic under 100 books, this will make it easier as their will be less competition.
Magazines.com - is another really good way to find if your niche topic has the money, if there's a magazine published on that topic, there must be people are willing to pay the subscription. (weekly, monthly, annually, etc) If you are interested in putting the extra effort into your product, you should pick up some of the magazines for that topic, you might be able to get some older issues for less. You can than review what ads in the back of the magazine are working (if the advertisers have advertise more than one issue, they must be making money from it) This could be a possible affiliate program for you to sign up with.
Now you also want to make sure your niche isn't too big or too small. Buying researching your keywords. For all your searches, you should go between 10,000 - 50,000 searches.Overture - Keyword Selector ToolOverture compiles the search results from Yahoo and partner sites. So when doing your research, know that a search for that keyword, would be about 5-10 times more. (Google, MSN, etc)
Next you want to check out the bids for your niche keywords, as a guide, if the top bid results are between 30 cents and $2.00, its a good indicator that people are making money.
Overture - View Bid ToolSome good resources to help provide you with additional information about your niche market:
TechnoratiNichebotGoogle Trends - reveals a lot of useful information
ClickBank - you find other digital products, additional possibility of affiliates or joint ventures
Once you have completed the above research, you list of 10 should be between 1-3, now its up to you to decide which one you want to move forward with, if any others, just put them aside, maybe a future product.
Good luck and have a great day
Mike G.
