What Niches Make Money in Email Marketing?

Objective: Learn how to identify email marketing niches that have money making potential – both NOW and LONG-TERM. What You’ll Accompl...

Objective: Learn how to identify email marketing niches that have money making potential – both NOW and LONG-TERM.
What You’ll Accomplish: When you finish this lesson you will have memorized the four key factors that make a profitable email marketing niche.
Estimated Completion Time: 10-15 minutes
Before You Begin: Get a notebook and pencil for the exercise at the end.
One of the fundamental mistakes new email marketers make is picking the wrong niche to build a list and market products to. To start you off right, I’m going to make sure YOU don’t make this mistake.
Before we begin, let me remind you what a niche is.

A niche is a need in the marketplace. Some examples of niches are weight loss, getting your ex back, making money online, video game strategies, and cooking. All of these are topics that people want information and products on.

Picking the wrong niche is deadly because you’ll find it VERY hard – if not impossible – to make money with that list.
The biggest reason why people choose the wrong niche? They pick what they are interested in or what “seems like a cool idea” – instead of doing research into what is actually selling.

EXAMPLE of a BIG Mistake! When I found out about Internet Marketing, I thought it’d be a great idea to market to the “how to study in college” niche. “Common sense” told me college students were interested in getting good grades. Heck, all my friends were asking me how I was doing it! So surely they would buy an ebook that taught them how to get good grades without working super hard, right? I also saw that no one was marketing to this niche, so I thought I could dominate it. I thought I was brilliant! Of course, there was a REASON why other people weren’t marketing to this niche: college students don’t like to buy stuff that’s not pizza or alcohol. To my disappointment, the product flopped. I couldn’t sell anything to this niche. After losing a lot of money I did NOT have, I learned my lesson: ALWAYS do market research to see what SELLS.

If other people aren’t selling to a niche market, then there’s probably a good reason.
Don’t go into Internet marketing thinking you have to reinvent the wheel and find the one amazing niche that nobody else has found. That is NOT the right approach.

You want to look at niches that other people are already finding success in. That way you can replicate that success for yourself. If no one else is doing it, you shouldn’t either. This is the essence of niche research.

I’ll show you how to do detailed research online later in this step. But first I want you to memorize the four things that make a profitable niche, both in the short-term AND the long-term.
Yes, I said memorize these principles – they’re that important! Here they are:

1. Are there always offers to promote?
2. Are customers in this niche known to buy?
3. Can you market to this niche online in a profitable way?
4. Do you like this niche?

Now I’ll talk about each one in detail.

4 Keys to a Profitable Niche

1. Are there always offers to promote?

For a niche to be profitable, you need to be able to promote multiple offers.

In case you forgot, an offer isn’t just any old product. It’s relevant and interesting to your subscribers, and it’s exciting because of all the value it delivers.
Promoting offers to your subscribers is how your business makes money. Therefore, it’s important that you have access to a wide variety of offers so you’ve always got something fresh and relevant to promote.
For example, weight loss can be a terrific email marketing niche because there are all kinds of offers you can promote, from physical products (like supplements) to information products (like weight loss ebooks and videos).
However, having offers to promote isn’t enough…

2. Are customers in this niche known to buy?

If your business is going to be profitable, people need to be willing to actually spend money on products in the niche.
This was the flaw with my “how to study in college” niche. While I could produce all kinds of “how to study” products, my market – students – weren’t in the mood to buy that kind of information.
You also need to be sure that people in the niche are buying ONLINE. The only way your business will be able to generate revenue is if buyers can be traced back to your email list. That’s done through the offer links you’ll place in your emails.
But if your subscribers aren’t likely to buy what you promote ONLINE, you won’t be able to generate revenue. An example is people who research high ticket electronics online. They may read about the latest LED TVs on the web, comparing all the models and reading all the reviews… but then they will go to the local electronics store to make the actual purchase. That’s NOT a good niche for email marketing!
The next question to ask is…

3. Can you market to this niche in a profitable way?

Some niches meet the previous two conditions, but are so expensive to market to that they can’t generate enough profit to be worthwhile.
You’ll see this with some saturated mega-niches where the cost of getting traffic (in either time or money) is very high because of all the competition.

By a “mega-niche” I mean a really huge general market, like “dating” or “cooking.”

That doesn’t mean you can’t make money in a mega-niche. I have known some marketers who have done it very successfully.
But when you’re starting out, you’ll have to narrow down the niche and hone in on a specific group. Examples might be “dating after divorce” or “cooking Paleo meals.” This will keep the cost of acquiring traffic a lot lower.
Even if all three of the above conditions are met, you still need to ask yourself one important question…

4. Do you like this niche?

Liking a niche is helpful. It makes it much easier for you to create emails, share information and promote products. You’ll enjoy it!
With all the profitable niche opportunities out there, there is no reason why you can’t find at least one that you are personally interested in.
Now we’ll stop for a moment and review, knowing that your goal is to find a niche that meets these four criteria so you can build your business around it.

Recap

One of the biggest mistakes email marketers make is to select a niche without doing research into whether it is profitable or not.
While doing your research, look for these four keys:

1. Are there always offers to promote; lots of things to buy?
2. Are customers in this niche known to buy?
3. Can you market to this niche online in a profitable way?
4. Do you like this niche?

EXERCISE

1. Take out your notebook and pencil.
2. Copy down each of the 4 Keys to a Profitable Niche.
3. Read each one out loud. (I know it sounds weird, but this helps you memorize. I wrote a whole book about studying, I should know!)
4. Write down the 4 Keys one more time.
5. Read them out loud again.
6. Now walk away, get a cup of coffee or tea, and relax for a few minutes.
7. Now start with a clean sheet of paper, and see if you can write down the 4 Keys from memory.
8. If you can, great! If not, repeat steps 2-5, and try again.

THE WISE MARKETER KNOWS… Never use “common sense” to select a niche. It can trick you into spending a lot of time and money on something that won’t make you any money. Instead, rely on research into niches that have made other people money. Don’t try to be clever or reinvent the wheel!

At this point you may have a lot of ideas bouncing around in your head. To make things easier, in the next section I’ll show you some of the most common email marketing niches…