You may already have a few ideas for niches. You may have one or several hobbies or areas that you are passionate about and are very knowledgeable about. You may have already done keyword research or search engine research to see if there are others that share your interest for your niche.

Sometimes generating an idea for a killer niche market is the hardest part. Because there are so many, selecting one niche and running with it can be the toughest part of the niche battle. If you think about it there are niches everywhere! Your uncle eats sleeps and dreams bowling. Your sister is an avid gardener supplying you with fresh veggies every year. Your brother has thousands of matchbooks from restaurants all over the world. Your nephew has every sponge bob item on the planet.

These are fairly general things. But they are a beginning. There are tons of resources – offline and online –  that you can use to find or generate ideas for a killer niche market.

Offline:

• Newspaper
• Niche Magazines
• TV and Radio – especially infomercials
• Catalogs and mail order – subscribe to newsletters, purchase inexpensive products, get on mailing lists
• Tabloids and Mainstream Media
• Billboards
• Socializing – coffee shops, customers, friends, neighbors ect..
• Books – local bookstores and / or library
• Brainstorm

Online:

• eBay Pulse – http://pulse.ebay.com
• Amazon – http://www.amazon.com
• Online news websites – cnn.com, foxnews.com, cnbc.com
• Craigslist – http://www.craigslist.com
• Trend Watching – http://www.trendwatching.com
• Trend Hunter – http://www.trendhunter.com
• Google Groups – http://groups.google.com
• Dig – http://www.digg.com
• Google Trends – http://www.google.com/trends
• Delicious Popular – http://del.icio.us/popular
• Magazines.com – http://www.magazines.com

Google Zeitgeist -  the hottest search trends http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

 From here you can select:

• Google Trends – For a broad look at search query data, enter up to five search terms to see relative popularity over time.
• Trends for Websites – Google Trends for website traffic data. Type in a website address to see visitors by region and related sites visited.
• Insights for Search – A deeper dive into search query data for marketers and power users. Create your own lists of “most popular” and “fastest rising” queries for different geographic regions over time and by topic.
• Hot Trends – The top 100 fastest-rising search queries right now (U.S. only).

At some point you should have a list of ideas to research. Now you need to look deeper – into sub niches. Research is the easy part. OK maybe not. But for many the hunt is the best part. Some of us are born researchers. We like to hunt out the facts, the meat and potatoes of a niche market. Who’s searching for this? Who’s buying? At what price?

eBay Pulse is a great place to start looking at sub-niches. Select the category first (using the topics you gathered from your niche research list), then look for profitable subniches by selecting a sub-category.

Now that you have some potential sub-niches to work with, you will want to see how much of a market there is. Just because a sub-niche is popular doesn’t mean people spend money on it.

Amazon – http://www.amazon.com

Amazon is a great place to see what currently exists for any given sub-niche. Chances are, the more books there are written on that subject, the more that market spends on those topics.