Where to Find Hidden Niches (and Riches)

And thanks to Google, you can now do both—for free.

The secret, if you haven’t used it yet, is Google Trends.

Like the coolest kid at school, it always knows what’s hot and what’s not.

Identify New Niches

Finding the best words to use in promoting your offering is a definite plus.

But you’ll have far more success if you find an unfulfilled niche before you create a product.

Google Trends lets you find emerging markets by tracking searches. So you can create products and services for under-served customers.

And you can do it instantly. Just visit the Google Trends homepage and see what’s hot.

For example, a few weeks ago "tapeworm" was the number one search on Google.

You probably never thought about creating products to help people fight tapeworms.

But the market, and the profit, might be there.

Validate Potential Niches

Of course, you should probably validate that there’s long-term interest in tapeworms.

Which leads to another astounding use for Google Trends.

Just visit the site and enter a keyword, and you’ll see how interest in it has changed over time.

A search for "tapeworm" reveals that, in fact, there has been steady
interest, with occasional spikes like the one a few weeks ago.

Target Rising Keywords

Once you validate your niche, you can also use Google Trends to determine what keywords to target.

For example, at Commune we offer web writing services.

People looking for "web writing" might also search for "online writing," "writing for the web" and "website writing."

Using Google Trends, we can see how searches for these different keywords have changed over time.

And what we learned is that "online writing" has had the greatest sustained traffic.

So if you’re growing an online business, or starting a new one, you might want to spend some time analyzing trends.

And perhaps the best part? It’s addictively fun.