Magazines Can Tell You about Your Niche

Magazines are a gold mine to a web business person. If you find a magazine that targets your niche, here's what it will do for you:

• Give you a rough idea of how big your niche is.
• Tell you what problems your niche has.
• Tell you what products people are buying.
• Provide you with topics you can write about, or have someone else write about, to raise your rankings in the search engines and attract more potential customers.
• Give you ideas for things you can do to improve your site.
• Offer a place to get word out about your site, both with advertising and editorial content.

Your 20 Minute Task

To find magazines that target your niche, you'll need to explore. In this 20 minute task, you'll look for magazines online. This will identify many of them. However, if you have time to take a trip to your public library, we recommend you also click this Extra Credit link and spend some additional time there. You'll especially want to do the extra credit task if you don't find magazines online.

For the remainder of this 20 minute task do as many of the following as you can:

• If you're a member of the niche, you likely know the key magazines and may even subscribe to some of them. Make a list.
• Next, go to the Yahoo magazine directory and see what you find there. Click the this category radio button at the top of the screen, type a word or phrase that describes your niche and click the Search button. (Hint: if you type a phrase, enclose it in quotation marks.)
• Finally, check at Magazines.com. First, type your keywords, one at a time, in the search box to look for likely candidates. If that doesn't work well, click the Browse by Category and Alphabetical Listing links you'll find in the left-hand column of the Magazines.com site.

If you don't find magazines that cover your exact niche, try to find some that are related. For example, if your niche were "dolphin lovers" and you couldn't find magazines just about dolphins, you could try for something about whales or ocean life or perhaps even cruises.