crazylittlenichethatmakesthousandsIt’s easy to get the impression sometimes that the only niche that is really profitable is “make money online”.

But that’s just because we are exposed to it day in day out.

The reality is there are literally thousands of profitable areas online: I’ve done very well out of the stock market niche and in GHG Membership we interview and decompose the web-businesses of real people who are making ethical and serious money in all sorts of niches. In the last few months alone we’ve covered the cooking, local business and fitness niches.

…and shortly, we’ll even be “grilling” one entrepreneur who is profiting from the online magic niche!

What constantly surprises me though is how profitable some of the more unlikely niches actually are.

For example, I was recently talking with a GHG Member who is looking at the herbal remedies marketplace.

After a few minutes of step-by-step investigation we found this site which has thousands of members that pay either $9.99 per month or $97 per year (imagine what that would do for you):

http://www.herbmentor.com

What is more this site has recently been put up for an industry award!

Now I know some people might have objections why they couldn’t possibly do this. So let’s get this out in the open and break down these down one by one:

Objection #1: I don’t have the budget to create a site like this.

Well, consider this:

  1. The entire site is based upon WordPress (which is FREE and very easy to learn)
  2. The software to control the membership side of things is Wishlist Member (a WordPress plugin which costs $97 and I know it’s awesome because I own it too!)

Remember: In the dotcom boom of the late 1990s getting a website created like this would have cost tens of thousands. Minimum. Now you can do it for $97 dollars without any technical skills at all. There’s never been a better time.

If $97 still puts you off then remind yourself this is a business – we do need to get real here. What does it cost to start an offline business? And most of those aren’t even profitable for 1-2 years, right?

Objection #2: I’m not an “expert” in herbs so I couldn’t create the content

We talked in a previous blog post of why you don’t need to be an expert to make money online (click here if you missed it). But here’s some things to start with:

  • Interview experts on Skype (probably THE fastest way to create great content)
  • Transcribe those interviews (I’ve done this many times by hiring someone on oDesk for $20)
  • Hire a writer on oDesk to repurpose those interviews into separate articles, cheat sheets or even free gifts to attract more subscribers onto your list
  • Invite people to write guest posts for you (example from another niche: Digital-Photography-School does this so the owner Darren Rowse doesn’t even have to create any of the content himself!!!)
  • Buy (high quality) Private Label Rights products and rewrite/repurpose them
  • Add a forum to the site so members can help each other out (adding a forum is very easy by the way)

Trust me, when you start doing even a bit of this you’ll start to learn so quickly. And remember there’s no such thing as an expert really, if you know a little more than other people who can help them. This happens every day in life anyway, when you meet people and they ask you questions.

Objection #3: I don’t know how to do the graphics.

You can learn GIMP (which is a free and powerful graphics program) and create your own graphics.

Whilst you do need to learn some core skills to make money online things like graphics are pretty specialized and as such I recommend outsourcing them rather than learning the process yourself.

Regular readers will know I use fiverr.com a lot for this. I love it: It costs less than the price of 2 cups of coffee and it’s just unbelievable what you can get in terms of quality!

There are other places you can go for graphics too of course: oDesk, 99Designs and bigstockphoto.

In short it isn’t a problem – I’m terrible at graphic design myself and most other successful people on the web are too!

Objection #4: I wouldn’t know how to get traffic/market my website

Ok, here are some things I would do if I was setting up in this particular niche:

  • Post in popular herbal remedy forums
  • Find popular herbal remedy blogs, comment on their blogs
  • Then guest post on these blogs
  • Then interview the owners of those blogs for my content (see above!)
  • Then get those blog owners to promote my membership site in return for 50% commission (Joint Ventures)
  • Buy banners on forums and blogs (very cheap)
  • Survey some forum members or just write an interesting article and do a press release so journalists pick it up and quote it as “Rob Cornish from TheBestHerbalRemedySiteOnTheInternet.Com”
  • Run some Facebook Ads to build a list of prospects

I could go on … and on….

But do you get the idea?

There’s nothing stopping you getting into and profiting from an online niche that you know nothing about. All you’ve got to be is interested in the subject.

Nobody was born with web skills, business skills, traffic generation skills or knowledge about specific niches. We all had ZERO web-knowledge at some point (for me this was in early 2010). It’s ALL learnable. And with the right approach you can massively speed up this process and enjoy it too!

Have you come across any interesting niches lately? Are you struggling to find one yourself? Do really think you couldn’t do this yourself? All comments, likes and tweets are good – let me know below… 🙂