Last Updated on April 3, 2024 by Dennis
Starting an online business is a great accomplishment. You’ve made the commitment to lead a niche audience who is seeking solutions for their needs. In order to step up and serve them, you have to understand how to do more than just push products at them.
You have to tap into their pain points, learn what makes them tick – and what they best respond to. They’re coming to you for guidance and that means increasing your knowledge about the niche topic – from evergreen fundamentals to cutting edge research and opportunities for solutions.
When you learn these things, you can use it so many different areas of your online business. You’ll be able to create targeted blog posts that speak to exactly what they need to hear.
Your emails will address topics they’ve been wanting to learn more about. Your social media posts will generate discussions with others who are seeking the same information.
But you’ll also be able to create the best promotions and info products that will convert into commissions and profits for you. This is all a result of you caring about how you lead your audience, and it begins with knowing how to conduct thorough research so you can learn and share information with your followers.
Start with What You Know
The first thing you want to do is create a file or place where all of your research ideas are stored. This can be digital or tangible, if you prefer to write in a spiral notebook or notepad.
You’ll be preparing your business for quicker results when you take care of this early on because when the time comes for you to create content, you can quickly and easily pull from your files to see what needs to be covered, and you can use it to track which topics you’ve already created content for as well.
Sit down and do a brainstorming session of what you already know about the niche topic. This can be things you experienced yourself, such as losing weight, earning money online, or learning how to motivate yourself, for example – depending on your niche topic.
Start by mapping out all of the questions you had when you first developed an interested or need in this niche. These questions will come in handy for future info product development and to showcase your expertise.
Next, go over the various pain points, frustrations and obstacles someone may encounter in this niche. It might be cravings for sugar or reaching a plateau if you’re in the diet niche – or not converting visitors to buyers or not getting subscribers if you’re in the online marketing niche.
Also brainstorm all of the potential avenues for success. This would include strategies as well as specific solutions, like products. For example, to lose weight, the strategies might be calorie deficit, eliminating carbs, etc.
For products, you might cover a variety of tangible and digital options, such as cardio machines to do at home workouts, or HIIT courses that teach people how to increase activity and burn fat faster.
When you do a brainstorming session, don’t just think about your own personal experience. Go ahead and brainstorm common sense ideas, too – things almost anyone would know, regardless of whether or not they had to deal with this issue.
You can also ask friends and family or think about what they’ve confided in you about this – or maybe what they’ve shared on social media posts. Sometimes people open up about the struggles they have, and you can use this to your advantage to help people.
Once you have your list of brainstormed topics and ideas, you can move on to the integration of other outside methods of niche research. These will help fill in the gaps of things you may not have considered, especially when everyone has a unique experience and journey – not to mention struggles that may not be what others have.
Turn to Existing Publications
You can learn a lot from the experts who came before you. People who have already taken time to publish a book of their own have typically been through the research phase you’re just now starting out in.
There are different kinds of publications that you can turn to in order to generate ideas about what you should be covering. You’ll find that some of them are evergreen. For example, a gardening book from the 1950s might have some fantastic ideas, as would a book from 2020!
Start out by looking inside a wide variety of books. These might be tips, specific strategies or personal life stories. For example, you may be in the personal development niche.
You might see a book about 100 ways to motivate yourself to achieve your goals (a tips example). You also might see a book about motivating yourself with a solid morning routine (for a strategy example).
And you could also find an example of someone sharing their personal development story, such as David Goggins. You wouldn’t want to copy David’s story. What you do what to do is analyze how he achieved the goals he set for himself and write those things down as your research ideas.
You don’t even have to read a ton of books in the beginning. But it is a great idea to always continue enhancing your education with more reading consumption. You can start by just browsing the table of contents.
So let’s say you’re in the fitness niche. You’ve considered and written on your list things like buying equipment for your home gym, preventing injury, and toning up your body as you lose weight.
But as you browse through a table of contents for one book, you see things you hadn’t put on your research list, such as improving your flexibility by implementing a stretching routine.
Make sure you pay attention to the consumer reviews and feedback on these books. You’ll see where they satisfied the reader as well as where they fell short, which is perfect for allowing you to step up and serve your audience.
Consumer magazines are another place to get great ideas. You can even do this by looking at the covers of your favorite niche magazines. If you’re in the health niche, you might look at broad consumer women’s magazines, but also at specific health publications like Prevention magazine.
A women’s magazine might cover topics like thyroid health, weight loss, detoxes and cleanses. When you look at the Prevention covers, you see things like improved memory and energy, longevity and weight loss.
You can also go to discount bookstores and pick up many of these previous publications in bulk at a fraction of the cost. Then you can cut out relevant materials and put them in a swipe folder for when you’re ready to create content.
Documentaries on your niche topic can yield many ideas. You can find these on YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and more. You’ll find them good for many niches like health, weight loss, survival and relationships.
Not only can you get information from the documentary itself, but you can look at feedback and reviews to see what people thought of it for more ideas. RottenTomatoes.com has a lot of reviews for documentaries and you can see both the positive feedback as well as the negative ones, too.
For example, when you look up the health documentary Super Size Me, you’ll see that some people loved the emphasis on an individual’s need to take personal responsibility for their health and weight.
Others didn’t like the fact that the host of the show went from eating vegan to 5,000 calories a day at McDonalds and then acted as if all fast food makes you fat. So you might jot that down as an idea to discuss what a realistic indulgence in fast food is compared to a gluttonous amount that is obviously detrimental to your health.
Investigate Trends and News
Bestsellers lists can provide you with immediate research on what’s in demand and being bought by consumers in that very moment. Updated hourly, Amazon’s bestselling books list hold a wealth of information.
You can look up the top sellers as well as hot new releases to see what the buzz is in your niche market. You can also look on other sites to see their lists, too. Don’t forget to look at more than just books, though.
For example, if you’re in the weight loss niche, you might see a trend for weight loss hypnosis topics in books. But if you also want to discuss fitness with your audience, you would look up fitness equipment, where you’d see fitness trackers and ab rollers selling nicely.
Google News will tell you what’s being discussed on a broader level. If you go to Google and type in your niche keyword, such as keto, then click on the News tab, you’ll see what’s being said right now about it.
For example, at the time of this report there’s a new article about the benefits of trying what’s known as mild keto over hardcore keto because it’s more sustainable. So on your list of research ideas, you should add the various levels of keto commitment and implementation.
YouTube lets you filter videos according to the time they were published. So you can search what was released in the past hour, all the way to the past year. This helps you get a feel for changing tides in terms of popular content topics.
Use a Keyword Tool Strategically
There are both free and paid keyword tools. You can start out with a broad word or phrase and generate ideas this way. Keep a file and start drilling down on each one to see what people want to know.
Both broad and longtail keyword phrases can benefit your research. You might start with the phrase keto diet. That can deliver more phrases like keto diet diabetes. Take that phrase and dig down even more, finding phrases like keto diet for diabetic vegetarians.
Look for buyer keyword phrases. These are phrases that start with words like best or buy, not words like free or how to. So a phrase like best keto course is a good indicator that the person is looking to buy. But the phrase how to start keto diet is probably someone looking for free information.
Use question sentence starters like how, why, what, etc. When you type in the words what keto into a tool, you’ll get good buyer phrases like what keto bread can I buy in your results. This is helpful for a future blog post that you monetize to promote affiliate products.
Spy on Social Content and Engagement
Spying on other people’s social media accounts and the engagement they get from those can help you add to your list of research topics. There are many places you can do this and it allows you to remain stealth with your spying operations.
Start with other peoples’ niche blogs. These would be your competitors – from the biggest companies to the smaller solo entrepreneurs who have an engaged audience. You want to go to their blog and see what they’re talking about.
You never ever want to rip their content off. Don’t copy their exact slant. Don’t copy their response. Don’t even think of being a replica of what they’re doing. All you’re doing is gathering ideas for research and topics.
You can certainly read and educate yourself if you discover a method or concept you weren’t well-versed in before, but that’s where it ends. So for instance, let’s say you were in the golf niche and you saw a blogger discussing the yips.
You’d never heard of the yips. But don’t copy their blog and use their ideas for yourself. Just jot down “yips” into your idea and research list and take time to learn more about it later from a variety of sources so you can discuss it from scratch on your blog.
Take a minute to read through the comments on the blogs you visit. See what others are saying. For example, if you see someone on a diet blog saying she stalls out on her weight loss when doing keto – that might give you an idea for possible plateau causes, like sugar alternatives.
Don’t just do this on peoples’ blogs. You can find topic and research ideas on other social media accounts, and look at the engagement they’re getting, too. On Facebook, join niche groups and follow your competitors to see what they’re discussing.
You can also just conduct searches on Facebook and click on Posts and you’ll be able to see the public posts people have shared about this topic – from experts sharing information to everyday individuals struggling with it.
On Twitter you can use hashtag searches to see what people are talking about. You’ll also be able to see the replies given to these people, and this can spark some ideas for you.
Instagram has the same concept. When you follow someone in your niche, make sure you look at the hashtags they’re using, too. Niche marketers will typically add a long list of related hashtags that might be good phrases for you to investigate as possible niche research topics.
You can even see what’s taking off on Pinterest and other social media accounts. Look for three things: the topic they’re posting about, the hashtags being used, and the comments your target audience are leaving.
Conducting niche research is a task you should do a lot of in the very beginning to ensure you’re meeting the needs of your customers. Then, over the course of the coming weeks, months and years, stay abreast of all of the breaking news and information you need to position yourself as one of the most helpful leaders in your niche.