Membership Niche Selection Tips

In order to make sure your membership business is profitable, you have to select the right market. Here’s how.

Step 1 – Find a Fanatical Market

The number 1 thing you have to do is find fanatics if you want a profitable membership website. Simply put, a fanatic is someone who’s willing to spend time and more importantly money on a topic they are interested in. Now that we know what we’re looking for, let’s talk about how to find them…

• Look at magazine racks. This is an often overlooked, yet extremely simple way to find niches that people are interested in. In today’s economy, running a magazine is tougher than ever – some of the best ones are going out of business. So if it’s on the shelves, it’s making money, which means there is a big market interested in this topic. If they can make money in a print version, you can probably make money with a membership website.
• Pay attention throughout the day in your regular activities. See what people are talking about on the radio, TV, at parties, in public, etc. If people are talking about it, they are interested in it. Which means you can start a membership business providing information on it.
• Conventions, clubs, and organizations. Once again, if there are enough people interested in a topic to create a club or organization, then there are enough people to build a membership business around it. By the same token, if enough people are interested to hold a convention on a certain topic, you can definitely find enough people to build a membership business around that same topic.
• And of course there are all the things you have an interest in, too! If you’re interested in something, it’s highly likely others are, too. The icing on the cake here is that you get to build a business doing something you love.
• Another fantastic way to discover what people are interest in is Google Trends. This service shows you the current most popular search terms. These are the things people are actively searching for in Google. They’re searching because they want information. These are the niches you want to be in – lots of people actively searching means lots of opportunity.

Step 2 – Determine the financial feasibility

Once you found a potential niche or topic to center your membership site around, you need to figure out if you can actually make any money in it. An easy way to determine this is to figure out if anyone else is making money in this niche.

Here’s how to determine if you can make money in your chosen niche

• Find out if there are blogs or forums related to it. Just search Google for “YourNiche blog” & “YourNiche forum” and see what comes up. This tells you there are people who are actively interested in your niche.
• Search Amazon, Google shopping and eBay to see if people are creating and selling products in the niche. It’s a good sign if there are because it tells you people are making money here.
• Monitor Google Adwords to determine if people are running the same ads for weeks in a row. If they are, this means they’re making money on these ads – otherwise, they’d stop running them. Which means there is money to be made in your niche.

Last, but not least… How hard will it be to break into this niche?

After figuring out a good niche and determining that other people are making money in it, the last thing to do is decide if you will be able to enter the market. Here’s how to make this determination:

• Look at the product types in this niche. You want to find a niche where information products are being sold as the norm. Membership websites based on information are the easiest to start and maintain.
• The next thing to look at is the competition. You don’t want to try to break into a saturated marketing, so figure out how many people are already selling in this niche.
• Size vs. Competition. Some competition is good. It means that this is a profitable market. And as long as the size of the market is large enough to support the competition, you’re fine.
• How quickly do people in this market make buying decisions and are the ready to buy? Depending on the market it can be anywhere from a couple minutes to a many months between when someone starts the investigation process to when they actually make a purchase.

Putting it all together

OK, now that you’ve figured out what niche you’re going to go into. Determined there is money to be made and that the competition is not too strong to break into it. You’re ready to start your membership business. If you’ve followed along with these steps you’re success in practically guaranteed. The only thing left to cover is exactly how to run your membership business…

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