I have to admit it that Merch By Amazon or (MBA) is a game-changer, especially in the t-shirt printing business. It allowed easier entry for aspiring entrepreneurs to be a part of this exciting business since it removed the hard parts of the business which are order processing and delivery. Some people can instead focus on design creation and marketing.
How can you research profitable Merch by Amazon niches? You can follow these steps:
- List all possible niche ideas.
- Do related keyword search through Google of your niche idea.
- Check for the competitiveness of keywords.
- Make a decision about whether to proceed or not.
The main thing here is to settle on one niche that will do the job for you instead of having many niches in different areas that will spread your attention thinly. You will eventually get overwhelmed by this.
Remember that your niche will set the ceiling level for your business growth and your designs will directly affect your sales.
It will make sense economically to only have one niche in the beginning. You will just cater to existing customers who are already in your fold instead of looking for new ones. Your costs will be lower and if the niche is not working out, you can just fold your tent and go to the next one.
A single niche can still grow over time.
With a proven marketing strategy at hand, you will just need to add similar products to your online store. When you are maxed out here, you can just move to the next niche and start all over again by applying all of your previous knowledge.
One advantage of taking time to select niches is that you know that there is a built-in audience already. You have a market and possible demand depending on your audience’s characteristics.
Your audience can be a Facebook page with a lot of followers, an email list, an Instagram account, your people in your community, or your friends and family.
However, I strongly advise you to look for your niche online. Your store exists in the online world so it is logical that your audience is primarily there, also.
You can easily discover what are the important things to your audience and design your marketing efforts around these parameters.
Before long, you will be considered an expert in this field thus enabling you to be a trusted source. People tend to buy more from individuals that they trust.
Now, I will go over each of these steps outlined above.
List All Possible Niche Ideas
Go grab paper and pen and list down all possible niches.
Start with the ones that you are familiar with or have knowledge of. Don’t think too seriously about this subject; just write it down.
Consider the following questions when writing your ideas:
- As a customer, what particular niche do you belong to?
- What are your biggest influences and passions?
- Any hobbies?
- What is your dream business?
- What are your goals?
- What are the previous work experiences that you can consider for niche gathering?
- What are the things that are important to you?
I like to start this list with you as the central factor. Your passions and own interests are right there inside this list. You will not lose interest at all since these things are important to you.
When done, select the top five items in your list.
These items should be a cut above the rest. You should enjoy working with these niches because you will be spending plenty of time with them.
Identify which of the ideas in this summary list has the potential to make money. Check online for this. Choose the one that has the most profit potential.
This is your niche #1. Rank the remaining items in your list based on the profit potential.
You will go back to this list in case that 1) your present niche is maxed out and you are ready to branch out to the next thing or 2) it did not work out with your present niche and you have to move on.
Do Related Keyword Search Using Google
Type in your idea of the niche in Google or any other search engine. The program will send back to you several keywords that are related to the niche idea.
Do searches for both the broad and specific topics of this particular niche.
Try to see if Google is sending back rich content that can give you more information about this niche. What I mean by rich content is that you are seeing dedicated websites, various blogs, informative articles, and businesses that are selling these products.
Do not be concerned too much if you are seeing many businesses here. It just means that this is a rich market with plenty of interested buyers around.
If you are not seeing a lot of content and business, then back off from this topic. Chances are that you aren’t going to make a lot of headway in this niche for there is not a lot of interest here.
Don’t even think that you can be a pioneer here since there is nobody around that is doing it. You will just waste time and effort.
You can also check out Google’s External Keyword Tool. This facility enables you to get information from both the local and worldwide as to the searches being done for this same keyword.
See if this main keyword is pulling in at least 10,000 searches per month and minimum of 50,000 for the related ones. This will validate that you have a working keyword that is generating interest.
You may even head out to YouTube to see if it exists in the video space.
The number of YouTube views generated by these videos is a good telltale indicator of a possible keyword to use. This is especially so if you will see that the views are mostly recent. If they are, you have a probable keyword here that can be later used.
Lastly, check out the affiliate marketing sites.
There are specific sites that can probably specialize in the niche that you are seriously considering. If there are numerous sites out there with many products available, this would indicate that you have a ready and waiting market.
You can consider these same affiliate marketing sites for added sales for your online stores. If you are their affiliate, you will promote their products. You will get a commission for any sale that they will make coursed through your sites.
Check For The Competitiveness Of Keywords
You should have a tentative keyword by this time.
Now, you have to check out your probable competition here.
Go back to your Google search engine and type in the chosen keyword.
You should get the other pages that are using this same keyword. You will see that Google breaks down this competition into both paid and organic which means free.
Dig deeper here especially if their location is near yours. These people will be your competitors.
See the content of their web pages and check their profile from social media. Check out their articles and videos.
Make A Decision Whether To Proceed Or Not
You will have to effectively decide now whether to proceed with this niche based on the keyword search and competitiveness.
I usually base this on how many websites and paid ads I see when I made the search. This tells me right away how viable is this niche.
If the volume for paid ads here is tremendous, I wouldn’t use this niche. There is just too much competition here who have already made an investment. There is a good chance that the market is already being handled by these companies or individuals.
Now that I have shared with you how to do niche research, I would just like to backtrack a bit and talk about niches. Specifically, how do you first come up with an idea of a niche that you would like to target.
Let’s face it. If you want to build a successful MBA store, a profitable niche and great designs are a must. Without these two things, no amount of branding, marketing, and promotions can make you a runaway success here.
What Is A Profitable Niche?
Having the right niche to cater to will obviously make your life very easy when selling in online marketplaces. You will have to work very hard in finding it and understanding its fundamentals to make this search a successful one.
These are the attributes of a profitable niche.
It Has Passion and Pride
People who belong to this niche are passionate and proud that they belong to this particular group. If you can tap into their sentiment, then you are on the right track to success.
A profitable niche will obviously have very affluent members belonging to it. They have a circle of influence that is wide and perhaps, rich also.
Passion is a strong emotion that is driving sales. Designs that can stir passions will be successful, no doubt about it. It is your job to come up with these designs once you have identified this niche.
You can say that one indicator of this niche is its size although if you want to be precise, check the amount of money that is being generated by this group. A big amount is an indicator of a passionate audience.
Start your search with these groups and work until you identify the specific group for your niche:
- Sports
- Cars
- Type of job
- Family
- Religion
- Hobbies
- Politics
- Ethnic background
Teams, events, fairs, and festivals have a strong and loyal following of passionate individuals who religiously attend their activities. This is a possible source of a profitable niche.
Big Audience
There is scalability in a large audience. You can adjust your targets with ease.
You will be served better with a large audience to start with. This is so even though there is plenty of competition here. Your growth and earning potential are capped and stunted in smaller audiences.
Selling potential and a steady income stream will be realized with a big audience. You can study this further so that you can, later on, break it down into smaller sectors to make design creation more focused.
You can estimate the probable size of your audience through Facebook. Check out the Audience Insights Tool in its Adverts section.
Create a new audience group and then target the specific interest or niche that you want to work with. Facebook will immediately come up with the size of this particular audience that you have specified. A group that has at least 100K members is big and you can start with it.
This tool is handy in marketing and advertising. It will give you information such as the demographics of this group. Specific designs can be created to appeal to the tastes of this demographic group.
But always remember the first rule about passion. A large audience might have a great potential for sales but without passionate members, you will not get anywhere.
Audience With Money and A Willingness To Spend It
Don’t pursue audiences that are not part or even aware of this online world or have little knowledge of the present technology. You will be stuck here right from the beginning.
Also, don’t consider a niche that has members who don’t have PayPal, credit cards, or worse, disposable income.
Children will not be a good target niche for they don’t have their own funds to pay.
To wrap up here, you need to target a niche with people who can afford to pay for your products. But first, they should be savvy enough to be able to navigate the web to see your online stores.
You Can Target This Audience Easily
You need to have this niche with a target audience that can be identified easily for targeting. You will then use advertising campaigns for this purpose. Also, modify your designs and even keywords seen on your online stores and websites for this.
Look again at Facebook’s Audience Insight Tool to do this.
A tip here is that if you can’t make use of this particular tool to get a close match, then it just means that this is a difficult niche to target.
Where Can You Find These Profitable Niches?
I will, of course, refer to online sources for this search. You have quite an idea by now of profitable niche characteristics and it is time to search for them. They are in:
Social Media
As discussed earlier, Facebook is the leading source as to where you can find these niches. I showed earlier ways to target audiences here.
You can also utilize the Facebook Graph Search function.
This will show you the fan pages that relate to the niche that you are targeting. See if these same fan pages have plenty of likes, engagements, and followers. A high number of these attributes will indicate that you are on the right track.
Consider also using Facebook because eventually, you will be establishing your own groups or pages relating to your niche, products, or store.
You can widen your search and go to Instagram and Pinterest. The good thing about these social media applications is that they are image-based. You can appreciate your target niche more as you see tons of pictures relating to them.
Good indicators in these two apps are if you see plenty of activities such as likes and image pins going on. These are probably profitable niches in the works.
Selling Platforms
Check Amazon’s best seller list.
You can immediately know that this is a profitable niche if you see your target ones showing on this list. The market is telling you that others are making money already here and so could you.
Shopify and eBay are also platforms that you may visit to check up on.
Search Engines
Use Google here.
You will see based on your search as to which niches have gained traction based on the results given back. Look closely for highly active forums and pages relating to your niches. This is an indication of passion and income opportunities.
Consider using Google Trends also.
This will enlighten you in terms of what is trending and hot right now in the market. You need to get wisely ahead of the forthcoming curve so you can cash in this opportunity immediately.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is also a fertile source for your search of a profitable niche.
Type in the search functions of this application the list of niche that you have in mind. An example of this is the keyword “List of dogs”.
Wikipedia will get back at you an organized list of these canines based on individual dogs, fictional dogs, dog breeds, and others.
Each of this category is a rich source of a profitable niche. You can individually go over these search results to learn more. You will get ideas here, guaranteed.
Take the results here and do a further search in MBA, search engines, and other online sources to validate the information you have learned.
A good thing about doing searches in the MBA is that it will tell you if this niche is getting sales already. It will also indicate to you that if the results are low but with sales already generated, this is a not a lot of competition in this area and you should be on it.
Possible Profitable Niches To Consider
I like to share the list of possible niches that you may seriously want to consider in your MBA online store. These niches are already proven sellers and have a strong community of followers.
Pop Culture
Sensational media news always sell. There is always an element of drama contained here. You can check celebrity updates on TV or online.
Look for the key phrases and imagery when viewing these clips. See what the hype is all about. You will get ideas from these.
But bear in mind always the Amazon guidelines on this type of things. There is absolutely no way that you will be allowed to use the names or logos of these people. Try instead using the quotes and phrases relating to the incident or person.
Define your niche for the followers of these celebrities or simply people who like everything regarding this pop culture. They will be there following regardless of the ups and the downs of their idols. Create designs based on this type of loyalty.
You may also look at the movies, singers and bands, TV shows, and other related things for inspiration.
A tip is to check out what is currently at the top of the weekly box office to see what is popular and trending at this moment.
Holidays
This has always been popular in terms of t-shirt designs.
There is, of course, the major ones like Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July.
Expand your designs to the lesser famous ones such as National Pizza Day, National Doughnut Day, and the like. You will be surprised that there exists a significantly big number of people out there who are aware of these type of events. People always have a need to celebrate and these events allow them to do so.
Always consider the mood of the holiday in your designs. For example, a bit of spookiness will do just fine for Halloween. It lends an authentic feel of what is happening during that day.
Consider that people always want to wear a t-shirt design that shows more than the name of the holiday plastered across it.
They want to feel different from the normal ones and it is your job to have designs that will make them become conscious of this difference. Have designs that will show how the same people feel about these holidays and you will have a surefire hit.
Motivational Quotes
I personally like this type of niche because it is a way for me to help contain negativity and hatred spreading today. I can counter these thoughts with these type of messages in my designs. I also love making people feel good especially the ones who are wearing my t-shirts!
Think about this. People always want to improve themselves. You are a conduit for this change if you can have designs that inspire them to continue doing so.
The good thing about this niche is that you will have plenty of possible design variations. The quote can be changed or simply transposed and you have a uniquely different design but with the same message. Change the colors and the fonts and again, a different design is created.
Conferences And Events
It seems that business casual attire worn during a conference are common nowadays. This plays to your advantage because you can create designs for these same events.
These same designs will be seen by the attendees of these conferences.
There will be influencers who can perhaps take these same designs to the very next level by posting it on their Instagram or other social media accounts. You will be opening up opportunities for your designs to be famous.
Major events like the Super Bowl, country fairs, and trade conventions can be planned for months ahead. Mark it on your calendars. When these same events are near, take advantage of this and let your designs out.
Health And Fitness
You will have people in this niche who are proud, loud, and of course, fit.
They will let the world know of how great they look and how hard they work to attain this. They love their lifestyle and are not shy about it.
They also use these same t-shirts with inspirational messages to drive them harder in their fitness routines. Transformational type of message will also work in this niche for it is relatable and inspirational.
It is your job to enable them to share their message with the world through your designs. Positive progression is the key here when you are thinking of designs to be used. Try designing something that goes along the line of staying healthy and fit always.
Music
Being a musician is not easy. It takes many years of practice and total dedication for people to excel in this field.
Musicians are expressive by nature. They can also do that by wearing t-shirts with appropriate designs like a picture of a saxophone for an aspiring Kenny G enthusiast. There are plenty of more musical instruments that are being used for you to consider.
You can also do the same through the other genres.
Consider the ones making the waves in today’s music. Electronic music with its related genres such as trance, club, hard house, techno, and others have a very strong following. They have a large subscriber base.
Have designs be created and available in time for the concerts or music festivals of these genres. You need to do research on the scheduling of these events.
As always, be aware of copyright issues in your designs. This is true for all niches that you will be designing for.
Academic Institutions
People are rightfully proud of the schools where they finished.
You can see this especially in terms of athletics. College football and basketball have a strong following of both students and alumni. It is a very fertile niche to consider.
Spending time browsing on sports-based websites (i.e., ESPN) will let you know if a particular school is doing well. You can plan for having designs based on these schools in time for major athletic events such as the Final Four or College World Series.
You can’t blame people to be proud of their schools especially for the ones who are doing well in the athletics. They have plenty of fond memories of their academic and social lives when attending these same academic institutions. These schools helped a lot in making them the person they are right now.
Great designs for college students will be a no brainer. Students like to wear casual wear every time and this is your opportunity to let your designs speak out. College lifestyle designs will surely be a big hit.
Consider also having designs regarding student loans. This is on the back of each student past and present.
Humor
Funny t-shirts are interactive, popular, and fun. They are always a hit for they can lighten every imaginable situation.
You just have to open your eyes and you will see humor everywhere. It is around you, on TV, and you can even see it while driving. The challenge is trying to convert what you see into a workable design that can be printed.
The good thing about jokes is that there is a good chance that people have heard of this before. When they see it printed as a design, they will probably buy the printed t-shirt.
Jokes have a lot of genres by itself. I find that designs based on relationship jokes sell well. I shy away from jokes that have ethnic, religious, and sexual undertones.
Food
This genre has grown by leaps and bounds for the past couple of decades. Everybody seems to be addicted to watching shows like the Master Chef on TV.
Well, it makes sense for everybody needs it in order to live. There are quite many food varieties out there. And for each variety, you can say that there will be dedicated connoisseurs for each.
And of course, there are foods for specific occasions such as Turkey during Thanksgiving.
You can even slice food further to its ethnic roots. Or even, its source whether it be vegan, kosher, or anything similar.
The point is you will have a lot of designs that can you create out these nuances. And you will have a universal and ready market to show it to.
Pets
Animal lovers are an ardent breed. They are extremely loyal towards their pets and wouldn’t mind wearing t-shirts proclaiming their love for their furry friends.
Image by stokedonprinting
If they can purchase all possible accessories for their beloved animals, then surely they can buy t-shirts which have designs of their pets on them. And that is why this is a profitable niche to target,
T-shirts, hoodies, long sleeved t-shirts, and all tank tops are all favorite items as long as there is a design of their pets on it. Just shows their pets in its cutest or most lovable face in your designs.
Others who are not that loyal or loving towards their pets tend to be wildlife supporters. You can have designs of saving wildlife and the environment and these will be a big hit among these people.
Milestones
Birthdays, bar mitzvah, anniversaries, passing the bar exams, and other similar events are always happening.
It will never get tired and you just have to refresh your designs regularly to keep them going stale.
For birthdays, numbers that end in zero (i.e., 30, 40, 50, etc.) always merit a special celebration. You can have more of these designs of this type than others.
You can also consider people who are having a baby as another celebratory milestone that warrants a special design. Your design may be the icing on these same celebrations.
Alcohol
Designs that show people being drunk and committing stupid things are funny and they sell. This strikes at the obvious fact that people like to boast of their extreme capacities for drinking alcohol. It adds a feeling of lightness to any gathering.
You can consider coming out with your designs before the arrival of the major holidays. This is a natural environment where people just take in more alcohol that they used to do
Lists
You are crossing on many niches here. The design possibilities are endless.
I suggest that check out what is trending whether in the Amazon bestseller list, movies and songs, and even what is being talked about. Then come up with a list that is related to these events in mind.
Just don’t do tragedies such as accidents and anything that involves fatalities. It is bad taste.
Charities And Non-Profit Groups
I also like this niche because everything feels right here. There is a lot of positivity and helping attitude. Causes also give the seller a good feeling about the product he or she is selling.
Your t-shirt design will be the clincher here because it puts everything right there in the design or graphic. You are an element of promoting society’s betterment.
Your Own Artistic Style
This is quite different from what I have shown above because, in this niche, you are treating your designs as a great piece of artwork. It is a beautiful painting on a garment.
You are not copying anything or reacting to what is going on.
You are incorporating design styles in your drawings. It can be cubism, surrealism, or gothic art. But it is you because you are passionate about this design and you drew it yourself.
You will be surprised that there are people out there who appreciate great art and who will understand your design. They will have no problem wearing your t-shirt.
