How Can You Tell If a Niche is Going to Have People Looking to Buy and Not Just Free Info?

Three words: proper keyword research.

Try the following tool by Microsoft:
http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-intention/

And the other major way is doing a test PPC campaign and find out.

One pretty solid indicator is a number of people actually selling stuff. If there are no or very few ads, or the ads you do see are the big price comparison sites which seem to have some sort of ad for any search you make, it's a sign that there may not be a lot of buyers.

@King Shiloh: King, you surprise me here. You usually offer better answers than this. Other than giving your own ego a stroke, of what use was this? Just asking...

I would like to add one more free and effective strategy, i.e. Type in a keyword on google and if you can see PPC ads then it's a buying niche, if only few or none ads then definitely a free info niche or a niche that is not profitable. I hope that helps.

This is why you should NOT be afraid of competition.

If you look at a niche that has lots of advertisers, people are buying. As John stated above.

I think too many people here spend too much time trying to find keywords, keyword phrases, longtail, niches...that have very little competition and then after spending months trying to sell something wonder why nobody is buying.

Look at the top money niches right now like weight loss, pets, ex back...find a product within a BIG niche and jump in the mix.

Make yourself different (USP - Unique Selling Proposition / Point) by offering something that the others don't. If you wanted to get people to look at a weight loss CPA page, offer them a special bonus from you just for looking.

Get your ex back, create or get some PLR and offer a free course on "How To Tell If You Are Being Lied To".

You can do that for any market. Find one that has PLENTY of competition and find a product that you can learn inside and out.

Don't look at trying to find some way to get on the front page of Google. You can make money on the third page of a big niche like weight loss, pets, get your ex back...and you can narrow your target by using some of those USP offers.

Would you rather be on the front page for the term "free Britney photos" or the third page for "where can I buy Britney's music"?

I've always looked at it this way, I would rather have 1% of the water in the Pacific Ocean than 100% of Don's Old Dead Creek.

Go find an ocean and dive in.

Like TommyGee said, thinking of the words someone looking to buy would use will help you uncover buyer keywords. Putting yourself in the buyer's shoes is a good first step.

Let's say you're looking to promote...I don't know, soap. A buyer might search for things like:

buy cheap soap
buy soap online
cheap soap discount
is soap a scam?
soap discount codes
save money soap

By the words they use, you can tell they're looking to buy. Even the searcher looking for scam information is ready to buy, but wants reassurance that soap isn't a bad product. On the other hand, some other keywords can also tell you NOT to use them. Some of these search terms might be:

soap repair
soap refund
soap sucks
free soap

In these cases, the search engine visitors either already own your product, don't like it, or don't want to pay for it. These are not the people you're trying to target. So, unless you actually do plan on giving away free soap as part of your strategy, leave those keywords out.

As someone else mentioned, looking at OCI (Online Commercial Incentive) is also a useful way to find out if the keywords you're looking at are typed by prospective buyers. If you've got it, Market Samurai can help you conduct keyword research with OCI.

I know this not really a niche, but you can try targeting specific product names because usually people are looking to buy they type in a specific product. There are some niches that are only going to make you money with adsense though. I've been making squidoo lenses for specific products. The IPK (info product killer) method also teaches this.

Make sure you have a look at how much people are paying per click for your targeted keywords. A high CPC generally means that there is money to be made in the niche.

The best way, as mentioned in a previous post, is to run a short PPC campaign with your targeted keywords that links straight to a sales page to see what sort of semi-cold traffic conversions you get.

Keyword Research is the only way.
Try my free tool to find buyer keywords: http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-...-just-4-a.html

Either Market Samurai or Keyword tool will do just make sure to search for buying keywords. I would use words like buy, purchase, order, for sale, buying, purchasing, on sale, cheap etc.