#+title: S01:O6 - phase 3: pick your winning niche
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* Links
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- [[../../toc.org][TOC - ecomm clubhouse]]
- [[../../_share/data/video/step_01/lesson_06.mov][video]]

* Notes

* Free websites discussed in this video:
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- [[https://www.wordstream.com/keywords][Wordstream]]
- [[https://etsy.com/][Etsy]]
- [[https://tiktok.com/][TikTok (YouTube #Shorts & Reels also works!)]]
- [[https://google.com/][Google]]
- [[https://business.facebook.com/][Facebook/Meta Business Manager]]

* Description
** intro
In this video, we’re going to be using data to help us choose what niche we want to build our store around. So to do that, we’re going to use several different websites. Now you don’t have to use them all, you can choose the ones that you want to use. But I’ll show you how you can use different websites. So we’re going to be using WordStream. We’re going to be using Etsy, Tiktok, Google, and Facebook Ads. Now, as I said, you don’t have to use all of these websites depending on what type of store you want to build. Whether you’re looking to do print-on-demand products and potentially do digital products, or if you’re planning on dropshipping products, you might want to use different websites.

But our goal is to use these websites to assess how big a niche is, how many sales there are, how many customers there are. And in general, the more customers that you see and the more people that you see interested in a niche, the more money there is to be made. Now it’s up to you. You might decide that you’re looking at the designs in that niche or you’re looking at the products in that niche and you don’t think you can make designs as good as that, or you don’t think you can find products as good as the ones that are selling. In which case you might want to go into one of the different niches on your list.

** wordstream
But for most people, what they’re probably going to want to do is they’re going to want to take the niches that they have narrowed down and then using this data, assess which one has the biggest audience because that means it has the highest profit potential and then to go in and choose that one. So let’s get started with WordStream.

#+caption: open wordstream
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex01a.png]]

So for this one, what we’re going to do is we’re going to assess and see how much search engine traffic our niche gets. And this is very helpful because not only is it helpful to see how much traffic we could get if we wanted to advertise products on Google, but in general, if there is a lot of search engine traffic within Google already for a niche, that’s generally a strong indicator that there’s a lot of interest overall.


And so even if you don’t think that you’re going to be using search engine traffic much from Google to get customers, it’s still helpful. Let’s say that we were choosing between the two niches of the Vegan niche or the Airsoft niche. Airsoft is a hobby game. So if we type in Vegan gifts. Click on ‘Find My Keywords’.

#+caption: use the free keyword tool
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[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex01b.png]]

Select ‘United States’. Then click ‘Continue’.

#+caption: choosing the country
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[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex01c.png]]

You can see here that we’ve got a lot of monthly searches, so there’s definitely a lot of interest for products but gifts for vegans.

#+caption: results of keyword search
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex01d.png]]

Whereas if we were to come in here and search for ‘Airsoft gifts’, select United States and click on ‘New Search’,

#+caption: try a different variation
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex01d.png]]


We would find that we get no results because there’s just not a lot of interest in this.

#+caption: no results
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex01e.png]]

And so as you can see by using this tool, it very quickly allows you to cut off niches where there just isn’t a lot of interest in it already. So that would be particularly helpful if you were looking to sell print-on-demand products. But how would you use this if you were looking to dropship products?

*** try a different niche

Well, let’s say that you were looking to dropship dog toys. Type in dog toys and you can already guess that there’s going tobe a lot of interest in this. Sometimes you can just use common sense to figure out if a niche is going to have a lot of customers.Yes, this has a lot of customers

#+caption: searching for "dog toys"
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[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex01f.png]]

So this would let us know then that if we wanted to pursue the dog toy niche for dropshipping stores, that it’s a good option. So this is a free tool. I highly recommend that you use it just to figure out your general interest as a whole. So WordStream is good no matter what type of products you’re selling.

** etsy

Etsy is another great tool to assess niche demand, but it’s best used for print-on-demand stores or stores that are going to be selling digital products that can be sold on Etsy. If you’re dropshipping only, then Etsy is generally not a good tool to be able to assess demand. So how would you use this? Well, what we do is we come in and we type in our niche and we type in different sorts of products and gifts.

*** checking for types of products on a niche

So let’s type in ‘vegan gift’, we could come in and see. So what we would do is we would come in and we would just open up different sorts of products that we would be able to sell.

#+caption: searching for "vegan gifts"
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex02a.png]]

So with print-on-demand, of course, actually there potentially could be cutting boards and something like say, Printify. But t-shirts, definitely something that we can sell with print-on-demand. What you want to see is you want to see that at least one person is selling, is successfully, consistently selling products in this niche.

*** check the reviews for an item to see if it is successful

And we’ll be able to tell if products are selling based upon reviews. And so it’s a free way to be able to assess. So you can see reviews for this item and reviews for this shop. So there have been 17 reviews for this item. Keep in mind the majority of people do not leave a review. Most customers don’t leave a review. But what we can see is that this has been selling throughout the year. So it wasn’t like it just sold at one time. It’s been selling throughout the year.

#+caption: check the reviews of a product
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[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex02b.png]]

And something you can also do, what we will do is check to see if maybe a store has other types of products in the niche. So this one here, 67 reviews. We can see that it’s been selling throughout the year. So there’s lots of items that have been selling and we can tell that because of the reviews.

#+caption: more reviews
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[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex02c.png]]

*** looking at cutting boards
If we could find a print-on-demand cutting board on Printify or print-on-demand app, that would be great. You can see that this one here is very, very popular.

#+caption: looking at a popular cutting board
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[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex02d.png]]

You can see that this is a very popular niche and that products in it do regularly sell well. We’ve already been able to find some very big winners and we’ve been able to find some products which consistently get sales throughout the year. So it means then that if we were to make products in this, that there is a large customer base for it.

*** looking at airsoft

Now, the question is, what about Airsoft? Well, type in Airsoft Gifts and compare it. Click on search.

#+caption: results for "airsoft gifts"
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[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex02e.png]]

Let’s open up listings, ignoring things we couldn’t produce with print-on-demand. Let’s check on a coffee mug. No reviews.

#+caption: looking at a particular item
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[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex02f.png]]

Now again, just because there’s no reviews doesn’t mean that nobody has bought it. But in general, it means that not that many people have bought it because a certain percentage of customers do leave a review. So it’s a small percentage, but it’s a goodway for you to be able just to assess whether there are indeed sales for it.

And it’s a free way to do it too, without having to purchase any tools. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the niche is bad per se. Now, because of the WordStream search, review the search, I would say that there’s definitely not a lot of interest in that. So when you combine the two together, that gives you a lot of data. If you just saw this on its own, you could say, “Well, maybe the reason why there isn’t a lot of sales of these is because the designs are just not that good.”

#+caption: looking at airsoft tshirt
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[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex02g.png]]

*** comparing our searches
If we compare them to the designs in the Vegan niche, there were definitely designs that were a lot more exciting and intriguing in that niche that people had created. Compared to Airsoft, a lot of these designs have been very cheap. I mean, you think about this design here. This one has had 10 reviews, and so it has sold over its lifetime, although it has been up for quite some time for it to gain 10  reviews. But it has had some sales despite the fact that this design here is really not that engaging.

However, when we combine it with WordStream, we can see that it’s not just because of the fact that it doesn’t have good designs and nobody’s buying it. It’s because of the fact that it’s also small. So those two things combined. Whereas compared to the vegan niche, lots and lots of sales. So that is how you can use Etsy to assess demand for a niche.

** tik tok
So TikTok is a fantastic place to come and do research for dropshipping products. What we want to do is we want to come and we want to search for our niche and to see if there are any dropshipping stores that have got videos that are viral with lots and lots of views. So let’s say, for example, that you were looking to dropship dog toys. Let’s search for dog toys.

#+caption: search tik tok for dog toys
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[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex03a.png]]

Now, something is also really helpful in general is that even if you don’t find dropshipping stores that have done well, this is still a good sign that there is a lot of interest in the niche as a whole. Now, it is nice to see dropshipping stores do well and that’s what I would personally be a lot more interested in. I personally like to sell products which have a proven customer base. But it is a good sign for the nation general that dog toys as a whole are popular.

So this one here is very recent.This was within the past few months. And you can tell that this is not a personal brand. Let’s click on this. This is definitely an AliExpress product. So this is being dropshipped, an active rolling ball. They’ve had multiple videos.

#+caption: look closely at one item
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[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex03b.png]]

Obviously, you can see that one of the things about TikTok is that not every video does well at all, but they’ve uploaded the same video multiple times and sometimes it gets traction, sometimes it does not. But it’s a little bit random whether a video does well on a single day.

#+caption: see a product gets shown in multiple videos
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex03c.png]]

So there is a really interesting thing about TikTok. If we come and we search for Active Rolling Balls in Aliexpress, here’s the product that they dropshipping. This shows that through TikTok, we can find successful dropshipping dropshipping stores within the dog toy niche. So this here would definitely be a niche with enough customers to be able to expand and to scale.

#+caption: check it out on ali baba
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex03d.png]]

** google
So Google can be a great place to find successful stores within the niches that you are researching both for print-on-demand products and for dropshipping products. Search for your niche and see if any successful stores pop up to give you a proof of concept. Let’s go back to the vegan niche. Search for vegan t-shirts. Now what we want to do is we want to find a look for global websites.

#+caption: look for tshirts on global sites
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex04a.png]]

*** look at everything vegan's site
Now we got several specific niche stores within Google. They have been big enough and they’ve felt enough to be able to connect with vegan influencers. Everything Vegan, we can take a look at their Instagram. So they’ve had several followers.

#+caption: see a companies site on instagram
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex04b.png]]

This is what you want to see. You don’t just want to come and see that there are vegan print-on-demand stores doing well. Although on the Google search engine, that is a very strong sign that the store is getting a lot of sales because it is ranking for the phrase vegan t-shirts over and above some very large websites. So Google would probably not be giving the store this much attention over and above other huge URLs if it wasn’t getting a lot of traction naturally. But it’s also helpful to be able to see that they do indeed have social media followers.

*** vegan outfitters
And there was another one, Vegan Outfitters,so another print-on-demand store can’t find links to their socials. Let’s do a search for them Vegan Outfitters. They have been successful enough to scale that they are hiring over on their Twitter, which has thousands of followers. So yes, this also this is another vegan print-on-demand store that has been able to scale based off of this niche. So further evidence that the vegan niche is a large enough niche to scale sales in.

#+caption: vegan outfitters site
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex04c.png]]

** facebook
So if you plan to use Facebook ads as a big form of marketing, then I do recommend going in and seeing the audience size within Facebook for your niche. So to do that you’re going to need to create a dummy ad. And to create a dummy ad, you’re going to need to set up a business manager account if you don’t have one. If you have a business manager account, you can just skip this step, but just come to this page here and create an account and fill out any information that they need. Click on ‘Create Account. Enter your business and account name. If you don’t have a name for your store, you can just call it something generic here like I did where I called it Sarah’s Business. Type in your email address. Then click ‘Submit’.

#+caption: create a business site
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05a.png]]

Then just go in and confirm your email address.

#+caption: confirm email address
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05b.png]]

*** facebook changes a lot
Now, something to keep in mind also is that Facebook does change things a lot. So by the time you’re watching this, it may look a bit different. So it could be an entirely different color scheme that they’re trying out their day. It could be a different layout of buttons, they might have changed the names of buttons, so the buttons might still do the exact same thing, but maybe they’ve updated what they say. It’s definitely one of the more frustrating things about using Facebook is that they’re constantly changing their layouts and their menus. So do keep that in mind that if you are planning on running Facebook ads as a main traffic source, that any tutorials that you see from me. The button layouts on screen and the name of the buttons might differ from what you’re seeing.

*** go to "ad accounts"

Now, come in and click on ‘Ad accounts’. Click on ‘Add’ and create a new ad account.

#+caption: create an ad account
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05c.png]]

And so because of the fact that this is just a dummy account, you can put in whatever you like. So if you don’t have a name for your store yet, you could just put something in like I did here. Then click ‘Next’.

#+caption: give it a store name
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05d.png]]

And then you want to go ahead and create your account. Click on ‘My business’ and click ‘Create’.

#+caption: create the account
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05e.png]]

And you’re going to have to give yourself permission as well. So you want to set yourself permission to be able to have full control of these things. And then you click ‘Assign’.

#+caption: give yourself full permissions
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05f.png]]

*** creating a dummy ad

Now click on the Ads manager button and we can create our dummy ad.

#+caption: click on ads manager
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05g.png]]

Click Create Ad.

#+caption: click 'create ad'
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05h.png]]

Choose one of these options. Any of them will do. And you can also just keep all of this because this is just a dummy ad. Click ‘Continue’.

#+caption: pick a campaign
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05i.png]]

We just want to skip through to the audience section. If you want to make sure that you’ve chosen the main country that you’re selling to, click ‘Edit’ on the location section.

#+caption: edit location
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05j.png]]

For almost everybody, it’s going to be the United States. I selected that so that that could be the audience that I am targeting.

#+caption: choose "United States"
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05k.png]]

And then you want to come to detailed targeting. Click on ‘Edit’.

#+caption: edit 'detailed targeting'
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05l.png]]

**** uncheck reach people beyond...

And you want to make sure that you untick this box. Now some people have found recently that if they choose conversions as your campaign objective, that they can’t untick this box. If that is you and you cannot find this box, please go back and change your objective to a different one that’s not conversion-based. Because to be able to see the general audience, you need to make sure that that is unticked.

#+caption: uncheck "reach people beyond.."
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05m.png]]

**** start searching on coffee
Once you have done that though, you can come in and you can do a search for your niche and you will be able to see the potential reach of people. So we can see within the coffee niche there that we had millions of potential people.

#+caption: search for coffee
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05n.png]]

And then if we go more specific down to different types of specific coffee such as latte, then we can see that we’ve still got a very large reach of over 8 million people. But not every niche has this many people.

#+caption: search for lattes
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05o.png]]

**** search the dog niche
So let’s take the dog niche for example. If we were to come in here and we were to type in our English foxhound, we’d see that there’s roughly 14,780 people within Facebook’s audience.

#+caption: searching dog niche
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05p.png]]

However, it’s given us a potential reach of 8500 people. So the discrepancy there is that Facebook can has roughly 14,000 people that it thinks within its database that would be interested in this niche. However, the number of people based in the USA that are between the ages of 18 plus all genders as well, comes to roughly 8500 people. So that’s why there’s that discrepancy there with the size versus the potential reach. And so we can see this in action here.

#+caption: look at the audience size
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05q.png]]

So you take the Akita dog.So the audience that it had there was over 2 million people it showed while I was searching for it. However, the potential reach is just 160,000 people once I’ve done the search. Why? It’s because Akita is a dog breed that is very popular in Asia, but is not as prevalent in the United States. And so sometimes it can be a little bit deceptive. You can see that there is a niche with a lot of audience size, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to reach those people with your Facebook ads.

#+caption: look at the akita dog
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05r.png]]

Whereas we take golden retrievers, you’ll see, that has a reach of just under 17 million people. And 12 million of them are within our audience, within the USA, because it’s a very popular dog breed in the USA. And that’s something that’s really interesting here, is that if you plan to create a product such as a coffee cup, which can then be cross matched with golden retrievers so that you can be targeting both the coffee niche and the golden retriever niche for a single product, which is a really great way to create a very highly engaging product for a customer by targeting two things that they love, we can see that we’ve still got a really great audience reach of well over 100,000 people. Of over 500,000 people.

#+caption: look at golden retrievers
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05s.png]]

So that’s what’s really nice to be able to see here with Facebook, is that we can see the audience size that we can get if we were to cross niches together.

And so if we were to come in and switch out golden retriever and instead change it to the Akita dog breed, we’d see that we’d be getting a much smaller potential reach. So just 21,000 people are really interested in coffee enough that they’re interested in a specific type of coffee and are also interested in the Akita dog.

#+caption: compare
#+attr_html: :width 600px
[[../../_share/media/img/step_01/lesson_06/ex05t.png]]

*** summary

And so if you were to run an ad targeting this sort of customer, it would max out really quickly. And   on using Facebook ads as a form of marketing, then I highly recommend coming in here and making sure that there is a large reach because sometimes it can be deceptive. Sometimes you can think you’ve but in reality it’s smaller than you might think. But if you don’t plan on running any Facebook ads, then you can skip over this site. We’ve gathered up after we’ve put any ideas onto these different websites, how do you choose the right one for you? Well, in general, as I said earlier, I think that most people are probably going to want to scale their business as big as possible. So that they can make the most money, in which case, then it’s a balance of assessing these different websites.

** Conclusion
Based upon what you saw, which of your niches had the most traction overall? It might be, for example, that you’ve got a niche that’s seeing a lot of traction on it, see it, seeing a lot of traction on tik-tok maybe you can’t find a website on Google, but that’s OK because you’ve already got a lot of data from the other websites to be able to assess and see that there is a lot of demand along with the WordStream searches as well. But you might put in any niche such as Airsoft and see that it’s getting traction nowhere. And you can also back it up with the data from WordStream to say that, “Well, it turns out that there’s just not a lot of demand for that niche.” Based upon my research here.

For example, if I was choosing between soft and vegan. Well, there’s very, very much a clear winner here. The vegan niche has proven itself through looking at the data to be a niche that a lot of people are interested in. Whereas Airsoft has failed across the board, it’s just not a lot of interest for it. So it would be very easy and the situation here for me to choose between AirSoft and vegan, I would choose vegan.

Now you might find that some of your niches actually have quite a lot of interest. So you’ve got a lot of interest in multiple niches on your list. In which case, I would recommend that you choose the niche that you are most interested in and that you are most passionate about. Because it’s a lot easier to build a business about something that we love and something that we enjoy. And also, it gives you a huge advantage because I find that I have created the best products, the highest selling products when I’m able to use myself as a yardstick.

What I mean by that is that I like to design products, which I would like to purchase, but that don’t already exist. And so it’s very difficult to do that if you yourself are not a customer in the niche, which is why I think that you’re going to be at a really big advantage if you can choose a niche where you are interested in it. And also, there is a big learning curve to getting good at starting a new business, and it’s a lot easier to stay interested in your new business if you yourself enjoy it.

So you would think that choosing a niche that has the highest profit potential would be the biggest motivator. But I personally have found in life that the biggest motivation is joy. Finding joy in what we do. So rather than just choosing something purely because of the money, I think that picking something that you enjoy is going to be a real big advantage throughout your business. What if you find that none of the products on your list have any interest? In which case I say, go back to the drawing board,go back to the first video, choose a niche and start brainstorming again.

But everybody is different, so it is up to you to make that choice. And one way that you can help in making that choice is WordStream, because WordStream does allow you to see if there is a fear of people searching for the sorts of products that you’re interested in already. If you do see a lot of interest on WordStream, but you don’t see a lot of sales and it then potentially your hunch could be right. I myself do prefer to go offer more hard sales data. And if you were going to make Facebook ads a very large part of your strategy, I definitely think that you should go through the process of setting up an Ad Manager account and creating ads within it to see the general interest in that. So, yes, go ahead, choose your niche. And I will see you in the next video.

As I’ve said in this video, sometimes the reason why there isn’t sales and traction in a niche is because nobody has come in and made a good store and nobody’s come in and make great designs. And you could choose to say, “Well, I think that’s the reason why I’d go into the niche anyway.” But I personally wouldn’t do that, because I would find it to be a risk. I would personally rather go into a niche that has proven sales data.
