How To Make Honest Money Internet Marketing (Part Two): Finding Easy Niches for E-Books
Yesterday I talked about how you could recognise whether e-books in a niche subject were currently being written by scammers, spammers and other internet marketing guys who didn’t have any interest in the field other than quickly lining their pockets.
Today and tomorrow, I’m going to carry on this subject by talking about a couple more things: firstly, I’m going to go over how to find niche markets that are full of spammers. I’ll then talk about what to do once you’ve found a decent niche that you think you could do a better job of writing a book for. Also, I’ll drop in a sneaky trick I learned that makes it easy to guarantee you put out a better product than other books (or any product, really) that you’ll find on Amazon.
How To Find Internet Marketer E-Book Havens
There are three major ways you can find out where the average quick-money hustler is going hanging out (or going to hang out next.) As with yesterday’s article, by no means am I saying that everyone in any niche is a scammer, nor am I suggesting that the products/niches I’m referencing are full of low quality products.
With the disclaimer out of the way, let’s go for the first one:
Reddit.
Reddit is a great source of ideas for all manner of things. It’s also a place where people steal ideas and finally it’s also a place where, due to the traffic figures, (it’s one of the biggest sites in the world,) you can literally observe in real time how the herd mentality draws people to jump into the same niches at the same time.
That’s good, because we want to know what these niches are. For business ideas, start with:
Look at the right-hand sidebars on those pages for related business areas. This trick doesn’t always work, but if you check every so often, you’ll find that sometimes there’ll be a lot of topics about one thing, even if you’ve never heard of it. For instance, a few months back there were a million articles about drop-shipping T-shirts. Before that, there were lots of topics about e-cigarette drop-shipping. I’ve seen white-label protein powder have its day and times where everyone was trying to make money from doing video-blogs.
When you see these trends, you can guarantee there will be people copy-pasting the popular guides that people have written and putting them into documents and throwing them up on Amazon as books.
Freelance Writing
When you write for other companies, and especially if you work on freelance websites like Fiverr and Upwork, you’ll be no stranger to the fact that every time a new fad comes around, there’ll be a million and one marketers all looking to pay you $50 to write them an e-book on the latest trend. Once you’ve been freelancing a while, you’ll be able to see these fads coming from a mile away.
Almost universally, freelance writers will have flash-in-the-pan clients who’ll be capitalising off the fads and then move on to the next one. Some of my clients have had me write ebooks on these fads, and then they’ve come back in a couple of months with the next fad. They aren’t building a business so much as riding waves. Their loss.
Amazon’s Quick Reads
If actually looking for these trends is too much work, there’s good news. You don’t have to. Luckily, Amazon does it for us.
If you go to Amazon’s Kindle store, you’ll find that you can drill down not just on subject, but on the amount of pages a book has. If you think back to yesterday, then we were looking for books that were 10-30 pages long. Amazon defines that as a 15 minute read, and you can go to their “15 minute reads” page.
Now, you might get to that page and find it’s made up of erotica, short stories and kid’s books. Those aren’t what we’re looking for, because they’ll naturally be short. However, we can drill down into a subject within the short reads section. That’ll give us more what we’re looking for in terms of ideas:
I went to the “health and fitness” section of the 15 Minute reads. There’s acne treatments, building muscle, burning fat, diving for kids, erectile dysfunction and a whole load of topics which are a bit ridiculous when you list them together. However, the point is that all of these books are ten pages long or so, and someone has gone to the trouble of creating them for profit.
In the next article, we’re going to talk about what to do one you’ve found a niche: how to create a better product.
(P.S. I didn’t realise how much there was to write about this subject before I got to actually writing about this subject. Tomorrow’s article will be about product creation, I promise!)