Show notes: Niche market ideas is the focus of today’s podcast.  The areas we will cover include wholesales (2nd part), forums, AliExpress and Pinterest.  If you find the content valuable remember to subscribe to the podcast and share the links with your friends.

Niche Market Ideas

Alvern: Hello, ladies! Alvern here. I’m so excited to meet you guys on the podcast today, after being a little bit sick last week. So very excited because it’s part three on the niche research series. And most importantly, it’s the final one. But I have so much exciting stuff to share with you today, I hope you really enjoy it.

So today we’ll be looking at niche market ideas. And the areas we’re gonna be covering is the second part of wholesale, we’re also gonna be looking at forums, be covering over AliExpress, and then finally we’re gonna finish up with Pinterest.

So, let’s jump right into it!

Thomasnet.com

So, under wholesale, we have the second part, I’m going to be looking at two websites. The first one is called ThomasNet.com. So that’s ThomasNet.com. It’s quite a popular site if you are a person who wants to create your own physical product or you want to sell products directly from the distributors or from the wholesalers themselves, or, should I say manufacturers themselves. It’s a really really popular site. It has been around for a hundred and twenty years, but you probably never heard of it because you would never be interested in developing your own physical products. So if you want to create your own, for example, something that needs to be cast in a mould, a fitting, or some sort of a little metal hanger, or, you know, anything like that, this is the perfect site to go to. You can go in and have a look at manufacturers; there’s manufacturers across the range.

Like I said, it’s been around for over a hundred and twenty years, and they cover six million products. I’ll let that sink in for a second. Six million products. And if it is, you’d think you can’t find anything on there that you’d like to either resell or a manufacturer can actually take one of their products and customise it for your particular market niche, then, I think rethink this all over again. There are over half a million suppliers on there, and they have their own product catalogues as well as you can list cover supplies on there.

So, that’s a good website. You can come up with a really big search bar and all you need to do is put in whatever idea. So, say, for example, the hanger. So if you, for example, you wanna … Decide you want to go into creating these lovely hangers for women only. That will be space-saving hangers, or hangers that’s eco-friendly, or, you know, hangers for scarves, or whatever it is. You just type in hangers there, for example, or clothes hangers. And you see the manufacturers who make the normal standard hangers, and then you can go to them and say, “Well, I have an idea for a prototype, of XYZ hanger, maybe hangers for knickers, whatever it is you want to do hangers for. And they will be able to create a prototype for you and then come back and let you test it in the marketplace.

There are also suppliers of weight-loss products there as well, so if you want to create your own weight-loss concoction, tablet, capsule, whatever it is, you can find them on there as well. So, really really brilliant site if it is you want to be selling physical products.

Thomann.de

The next one up is Thomann.de. So, I’ll spell that; it’s: T-H-O-M-A-N-N-dot-D-E. And for those who prefer the phonetic alphabet, it’s Tango-Hotel-Oscar-Milo-Alpha-Nico-Nico-dot-D-E. It’s a German website, and what it’s popular for, it’s considered the largest online and mail-order retailer for musical instruments.

So if it is you’re into music, or maybe you’re not into music, you probably have a family member that’s into music, and you’re just inspired to sell musical instruments, including the mics and mic stands and amplifiers, and … You can think of anything that has to do with music. This is the site you need to go to.

Why I really like this site is because you’re able to search, obviously, the items on there, but have a look at the reviews. So to sell things like guitars, drums, keyboards, studio equipment. But when you have a look at the reviews, the reviews are not like your standard one-star to five-star. They actually qualify the ratings based on the quality of the sound, different things that is actual tactically related to each instrument. So when you look at guitars, their star rating in terms of the items that you rate against, like sound, quality, that kind of thing, is very different to, for example, a drum, or a pad, or whatever it is. It’s such a really good quality website.

And, like I said before, when you’re doing the Amazon, covering of the Amazon section of the niche market ideas, make sure, when you’re looking at the reviews, look at it from a market research point of view. So you’re looking for what the lingo is when it comes to things like guitars; what are the customers talking about in that? As well as you’re looking for key words, so they might be talking about other instruments that they’ve bought before, in the past, and, as you can imagine with instruments, they have very specific key words. So you can’t be general, because they have part numbers and model numbers, or whatever it is. So, very very good site if it is you’re into music.

Also, look for what the customers liked about the instrument that they purchased. And for those who gave one-star or two-star, look to see what it is that the customer didn’t really like about the guitar for example. Maybe it was small, or too thin or too … Wasn’t able to tune it properly, or whatever the excuse was.

And maybe what you can do, once you find or complete your niche market ideas, research on this particular website, you can probably go and find a manufacturer on the other website that I mentioned before, which is the ThomasNet.com website. You might find a manufacturer on that website who can actually craft an instrument that will fill the gaps that was missing on the instrument when a customer left the one-star or the two-star.

So that’s all for wholesale. I hope you liked that particular section. It’s really good if you wanna get into selling physical products, because it’s so fun. It’s like shopping without having to spend any money, per se, until you’ve come up with your perfect product and you’ve done all of the different kind of market research.

Forums

Okay. Next up is forum. So the forum, as you can imagine, is a great place where people gather and talk about whatever it is they’re interested in. So there are forums for all kinds of things, like, relationship forums, or forums on SEO strategy, or forums on social media marketing, forums for everything as you can think on the planet. It’s a good place to go join in the conversation. And once you join in that conversation, you’ll get to see, or to understand, again the market lingo.

So the way you find the forums, before I jump into what you look for in the forums, is you type in … Say, for example, you want to join a forum where people are talking about koi fish. So you type in “koi fish forum” in the Google search engines, and pop! Up comes a list of forums. And what you’re gonna look for specifically are the ones where people continue to be active every day.

So when you jump online, you’ll see how many active members, or how many members that are on the forum. Well, not currently on the forum, but the total membership, and then you wanna see how many people are active in comparison. So if a forum has, for example, 10,000 members, you want to make sure that there are at least 200 people active every day on the forum. You don’t want to go in and there’s only ten people active and there’s 10,000 members, that doesn’t look like a forum that you want to be part of.

So when you join a forum, then you wanna go in and have a look and see what questions people are asking, the lingo that’s happening in that particular niche, what are people talking about koi fish, how to breed them, how to make sure they don’t die, how you protect them from frost and snow, whatever it is you wanna find out about what people are asking about and what they’re discussing and what’s popular. And if, for example, you go in there every day and look at what questions people are asking that isn’t being answered, a clever way to figure out what’s happening as well is …

This is something that we’re not going into a lot about, but you can actually set up a Google adwords ad and drive it to a landing page that encourages people to take a survey so you can find out what it is that they want to find out about a particular product that you haven’t created yet. I might cover that off in a video in the membership area. But in the meantime, that’s another way to find out, again, and do your market research around a particular product that you want to sell.

So, size of the community, number of active members, questions being asked. Just keep a note of that, and when you gather at least ten questions that people aren’t able to answer and that they’re not necessarily related to each other, and you think you can figure out a way to answer those questions by … Maybe, for example, the koi fish one. You wanna create a product that is a book – or ebook, should I say – about how to breed better koi fish or happier koi fish or whatever it is. So, there you go, I hope you enjoyed that little tip. Again, I said, I will eventually leave up videos … A membership section with videos going into even more in-depth information, showing you step-by-step how you can go through this yourself.