Before starting your POD career, you need to carry out in-depth market research. You see, there’s a big difference between having products to sell and knowing the best products to sell.

You might have products on hand, but who do you want to sell them to? This is why you must understand the niche market.

So, let’s back up a little bit. What is a niche market?

Let me make this simple. A niche market is a subset of the market on which a specific product is focused.

The market niche defines product features as well as the price range, production quality, and the demographic that the product it is intended to target. It is also a small market segment.

When it comes to the POD business, a niche is a specialized set of people or a defined focus area carved out of a broader market.

To make good sales, you need to create products for specifically defined groups of people, holidays, or events.

Serving a defined niche can help differentiate your business from the competition.

As a POD business owner, you should find a niche in your industry that has underserved or unmet needs. That’s your gold mine!

A niche is meant to be small – sometimes, the smaller, the better. As long as it’s a specific audience known to you, the opportunities are unlimited. You just have to know how to find the best niche.

How to Select a Niche Market

Creating a POD business begins with market research. This involves everything associated with the market. What’s selling? Are there any holidays or events that might influence a buyer’s search query?

This can help you choose areas to create products for during particular times of the year.

Another aspect of market research is niche-based. This is research on low- competition areas for which few products are being created.

When you decide to start an online business, choosing a niche is one of the first things you’ll need to do.

Having a focused niche will allow you to grow your audience more easily, connect with sponsors and advertisers, and focus your marketing and content-creation efforts.

The print-on-demand business is no different than many other businesses. Your niche is the area in which you will specialize. This will guide the type of products you focus on, the partnerships you accept, the content you produce, and the customers you try to attract.

When it comes to the POD business, choosing a broad niche is not always profitable, especially for new POD sellers.

This is due to the massive level of competition present in these broad niches.

For instance, selling funny white t-shirts for men is not a bad idea. But considering the huge number of people selling this same product, it might not be the best idea.

You can select a broad niche, then focus on something even more specialized within it.

• Selling funny coffee mugs for men is a broad niche. Selling coffee mugs for lawyers or engineers is a specialized niche.

• Selling shot glasses is a broad niche. Selling shot glasses showing funny Father’s Day quotes is a specialized niche.

I think you get the picture.

There are thousands of niches out there. You can start by creating products in a bunch of different niches to find some winning ones. Then you can select a couple of them to serve over and over again.

A Print-on-Demand niche can be a profession, a hobby, or pet lovers. For instance, you’ll run into less competition selling Civil Engineer Mugs than you will if you just sell coffee mugs for men.

You can create POD products for yoga lovers, dog lovers, or cat lovers. The list is endless!

How to Choose a Niche for Your POD Business

How do you go about picking a niche that both interests you and has a large enough customer base to be profitable?

Here are some practical ways to do it:

• Start by making a list of possible niches for your business. Write out your list in your journal or note-taking app. Brainstorm interests you can create products for, hobbies with large market potential, specialties or professions that you can focus on and potentially turn into a POD business niche. Also, consider notable holidays.- Next, in order not to get overwhelmed,** shortlist the top ideas** you’re most interested in turning into a niche focus for your business. There are no limits, so shortlist as many as you can. Choose from different categories like professions, dog breeds, hobbies, etc. To get more results, I recommend that you create at least 300 niches in each category. This way, you’ll be able to create many products in no time!- Once you have a shortlist of ideas, it’s time to** research** them to see which ones have the best market potential.- Start with a simple Google search. Yeah, Google is your friend! Research the popularity potential of each of these niche ideas. If you want to make great sales, sell products in niches that are popular in search engines, so plenty of customers will find you.Conduct a Google search of keywords related to this niche. If you don’t find any results for this niche, there probably aren’t many potential customers online.- Carry out marketplace research. Another way to know if you’re looking at a lucrative product niche is to research the niche on POD marketplaces such as Amazon, Etsy, and eBay. A simple way to do this is to run a search query for the product using the keyword for the product.Let’s say you want to sell a “Nurse Mug”. Run a search query for it. If you find a moderate number of products listed in the niche, it’s a good sign. At the time of writing this book, the keyword **“Nurse Mug” **had almost 30,000 results on Etsy, around 2,000 on Amazon, and over 9,000 on eBay.If a niche has a very low presence in a marketplace, like Amazon in the example above, it can either mean that that niche has not been explored, or its customers are not really into that kind of stuff. Etsy is one of the best places to sell POD products. Over the years, eBay has become more of a home for electronics products and appliances than other things.However, there are POD sellers who are making great sales on eBay. So, don’t be afraid to shoot for the stars. The worst that can happen is that you on clouds, right?- Do a Keyword search. Use a keyword resource such as Google AdWords Keyword Planner or MerchantWords.com to search for the keywords you looked up. You have to find search terms that lots of people are searching with. I usually use search terms that have over 500 searches a month.- Social media is your BEST friend. Look at social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest to see what hashtags and content related to these product niches are popular and how many people follow or use them. This will give you an idea of how large the market potential of that niche is.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen a lot of POD sellers list products without any specific niches in a target. They just list different kinds of products, apparently without any visible strategy or target audience.

Don’t do this.

Before you start listing your products or creating them at all, do market research to know what niches are getting the most traction.

There are two major ways to select a niche market before creating your POD products. You can either go with holiday niches or the evergreen niches.

I’d explain what I mean.

The Holiday Niche - No sleeping in Q4!

Holidays are the only time of the year when you can sell a product for twice the initial price and sell out of it in a few hours.

Yep, you read that right.

Most of the holidays are stuffed in the 4th quarter of the year – October, November, and December.

We call this Q4. And it’s the most important time of the year for every POD seller.

I started my print-on-demand business a couple of years ago and have watched it grow from a side hustle to a massive income channel.

The thing is, I didn’t even spend much time in front of a screen at all. Amazing, right?

So, what’s my secret?

Well, while there’s no special secret to success, proper preparation and having a good market strategy is definitely a part of it. One important strategy is to make the most of the seasons and yearly sales demand.

When it comes to selling print-on-demand products, Q4 is the best for making great sales. Why? From my own stats, I’ve discovered that 70% to 80% of yearly sales happen in Q4, especially between October and December.

These 3 months include some very important holidays – like Christmas – and are when more people want to buy gifts for loved ones. So, if you want to make sales during the holidays, you need to create products for them before they come.

Apart from Q4, here are some other important holidays you should consider when creating your print-on-demand products:

• New Year Day – January 1st- Valentine’s Day - February 14th- Mother’s Day - Second Sunday in May- Father’s Day - Third Sunday in June- Halloween – October 31st- Veterans Day – November 11th- Thanksgiving – the 4th Thursday of November.- Black Friday – the day after Thanksgiving- Cyber Monday – the Monday after the Thanksgiving- Green Monday – the 2nd Monday of December- Free Shipping Day – December 14th- Christmas Day – December 25th- Boxing Day – December 26th

If you want to create POD products for the holidays, you must take note of all of these dates. Many people will buy, and many people will sell. You want to be the one holding all of the cash when it’s all over!

So, make sure you DO NOT MISS ANY OF THESE VITAL DAYS!

If you want to profit by selling print-on-demand products, you should focus on making the most of the holidays by creating suitable products.

When holidays are around the corner, you should start strategizing and preparing. Think of products like ***Christmas Mugs, New Year T-Shirts, Halloween Face Masks, etc. ***This is because a lot of people search for festive products during these times, far more so than at any other time of the year.

No one searches for a Christmas Mug in April!

So, having one in your store at that time is not the brightest of ideas. But during the Yuletide period, everyone is searching for Christmas-related products. At that point, not having one in your POD store would be pretty bad for business.

Now that you know the best holiday niches, you need to know the best products to list.

There are different types of print-on-demand products. Coffee mugs, face masks, and T-shirts are just a few of them. But when it comes to selecting the best products to sell during the holiday period, you need to be strategic.

The last quarter of the year is when winter sets in. So, a coffee mug is definitely going up for sale. You should also consider shot glasses, travel mugs, and hoodies.

While these products are perfect for winter, they also come in handy throughout the rest of the year.

In addition, they’re classic gifts that people can buy without breaking the bank. This makes it easy for them to pick one up for their friends, families, or themselves.

In Q4 of 2019, I increased the selling price of my coffee mugs from $19.95 to $24.95. I also raised the price of my shot glasses from $12.95 to $16.95, and travel mugs from $24.95 to $29.95.

Guess who still made incredible sales? This guy!

I was able to sell them even at that higher price. If you sell 1000 units, you’ll make an extra $5,000 from last-minute sales. The items don’t cost that much, but because of the massive increase in demand, even a slight price change will dramatically increase your profits.

Face masks are fantastic product choices due to COVID-19. People need to wear them to reduce the risk of spreading or contracting the disease. So, it’s a wise decision to have some for sale.

The demand for face masks will be higher during the holidays because most people will want to go to public places. Cinemas, parks, and other fun places will be filled with people who have been locked up in their homes for the better part of the year.

So, they’ll need face masks to protect themselves while they’re having fun.

Also, it’s smart to list hoodies during this season. Most people will need new ones to survive the harsh weather that comes with winter.

The same thing goes for all the other holidays. Your plan should be to make sales during the holidays, and to strategize when there is no holiday on the immediate horizon.

Unfortunately, this is one of the disadvantages of depending solely on holiday niches. You only get to make massive sales during the holidays only. But at other times of the year, things might not be as buzzing as you’d like.

Now, pay attention. I don’t want you to miss the point.

In my experience, the most sales happen between October and December. For print-on-demand sellers, success during this period can serve as a great springboard for a memorable financial year.

Who knows? If you play your cards right, you might just make enough to take the whole of January off and go to some exotic island or something like that.

But you shouldn’t depend solely on the holiday niches if you want to enjoy consistent paychecks from your print-on-demand business.

This is why you also need to have products in the evergreen niches.

Evergreen Niche - Sell Big with Small Niches

Some niches sell all year long! No breaks! No special period of sale. All you need are products that properly target the right audience.

When the right products meet the right audience, the cash begins to flow in! It’s not rocket science. You can’t sell big if you don’t offer your products to customers who actually need them.

As a print-on-demand marketer, one of the best things you can do for yourself is to define your target audience. This will help you tailor your products to suit their possible needs and the niche’s trends.

There are several audiences and niches you can target. You can offer your products to moms, dads, daughters, sons, husbands, wives, family members, lovers, and friends. Everybody in the world falls into one or two of these categories.

You can also target niches such as **professionals – engineers, teachers, lawyers, nurses, and so on. **I have hundreds of thousands of products listed in different profession niches. You should have a list of niches to use as keywords when listing your products.

The beautiful thing about small niches is that they offer opportunities to make big sales. This is because many of these narrow niches have less competition. With few sellers listing products in these niches, you can get more buyers who are specifically searching for those products.

You can even create products in sub-niches. Here’s what I mean. If you find that the market for, let’s say, “engineers”, is becoming crowded, you can create products for narrower niches. Start creating products for **“civil engineers”, “electrical engineers”, **or other professions such as **“chemistry teacher”, “divorce lawyer”, “property lawyer”, “surgeon”, **and so on.

Instead of focusing on the broad professional niche, create products for a narrower niche. The narrower it is, the lower the competition.

But how exactly do you go about niche-mapping?

Well, there’s an easy way to do it. Get a piece of paper and go to Amazon or Etsy. Search using keywords like** “funny coffee mug”, “mom coffee mug”, “engineer face mask”**, and so on. Jot down a list of the interesting niches you find.

Over the years, I’ve been able to create lists of niches in the professions, dog breeds, pets, hobbies, family members, and so on. I use these lists whenever I want to create new products for my stores.

Remember, to make decent sales in the print-on-demand business, you need to have products in many different niches. Don’t stick to just one niche.

The more niches you have, the more free traffic you’ll get.

The more traffic you get, the more sales you’ll make.

I’ve noticed that many of my sales come from different products that I listed previously in various niches.

Now, here’s the interesting part.

Most of these products were listed earlier, but I didn’t sell them in Q1-Q3. Many of them sold in Q4.

So, just keep listing products in these niches. Many of these small niches have very low competition. Even if they have small traffic, combined traffic from multiple small niches is enough to earn you tons of money in Q4.

The best way to get the most out of the print-on-demand business is to find a balance among the products you’re selling in holiday niches and evergreen niches.