How to conduct market research in the fitness niche?

If you do a good job of niche research, all your questions mentioned will be answered.

Keyword research with a good tool (lots of suggestions here at the WF) will help you to understand what your prospects are currently looking for online.

Visiting Google Trends will help you to see interest in the niche over time (trends). Use the "explore" bar and type in your niche and/or keywords.

Visit Amazon and eBay and see what is currently selling and what items are most popular.

Visit Nextmark and see what targeted mailing lists there are on the subject. This will show you niche places to advertise as well.

It's all about being observant, seeing what others are doing, and keeping tabs of competitors and others who are already having success in the market.

Good luck to you.

Steve

Start by looking at what is selling - check out the popularity of products on CB (not gravity so much as popularity), Amazon (books as well as other media), Commission Junction (you'll need to create a free account, but then you can search items by EPC).

I always start by first looking at anything that tells me what products are selling as that is the best indicator of where commercial demand lies right now.

Next, I look to top content - top blog posts, leading social topics, top forum threads, the amazon books with the most reviews and comments and I study those to get an understanding of the frustration, desire, questions and opinions people have around the sub-topics within a niche. I guarantee if you do this for a few hours in a given niche you will walk away with at least a half dozen ideas that have high demand that you can further dig into using the techniques in #1

Finally, I then look at keyword research, not so much for signs of demand since I know there is demand from actual spending patterns, but rather to reverse engineer how people will search for those products so I can reach the target audience

After all of this, I still generally test new markets with either opt-in offers or low-priced products and sometimes I will test with affiliate products to get a true sense for what sells and the right messaging. Once I have all of that, I get to work on creating my own product, make it unique in at least one significant way, make sure I have a killer sales letter and then get to work on building a platform in that market.

Just like learning how to walk - then run :-)

Jeff