Google has stated that a niche is “denoting or relating to products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population.” Basically, something specialized enough that it garners a certain amount of interest from its enthusiasts. For example, Some high-ticket specialized niches come from outdoor activities such as road cycling, rock-climbing and fishing. Some low-ticket niches, such as painting and cooking, don’t need as much capital to start, and need consistent and unique content to gain viewership . Here are some tips to define what your niche is, how you can monetize it, and make use of your knowledge.
Recognize your Interests and Passions
- A great starting point is something that you are currently doing as a hobby. Dive deeply into what interests you and write them all out. Your list can be as broad and long as you want it to be, but you want to eventually narrow it down to the top ten things you want to invest your time, effort, and money into. Starting a business is hard work, but it is absolutely rewarding. If you start working within a niche that you don’t care about or have the desire to do, your odds of giving up will exponentially increase.
- Alongside the growth of your business, increasing delegation to more unsavory aspects of your work to someone who is more interested, or more suited for that line of work, will be within your favor.
- Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help you flesh out what your interests and passions are, and make sure to write the answers out.
- How do you like to spend your free time?
- What do you look forward to doing when you aren’t doing it?
- What websites do you visit the most often? Why?
- What topics fascinate you?
- Which topics make you continually want to learn more?
- What shared hobbies do you have with your friends or partner?
- If you had unlimited resources and time, what would you focus on and have fun with the most?
Recognize the solutions you offer
- With your list of the top ten niches that interest you, we want you to know narrow it down even further. When starting a new business, you first need to learn what problems your target customers or clients are experiencing, then determine how you can resolve them. Here are tips that can follow to help identify the nuisances and problems within your specific niche.
- Speaking with your target audience: Have conversations with fellow enthusiasts within your niche. Create a table or a framework of what problems they talk about. From there, you can discover several pain points within your niche.
- Surf the web: Search through online forums which relate to your niche. Take a look at the discussions that are ongoing and see what are common problems that enthusiasts are speaking about. Make sure to write those problems down.
- Research Keywords: Use Google Trends and the Google Adwords keyword planner. This will help you create a pattern of search items and keywords related to the pain points that people are facing.
Look through the beaten path
- There are generally a good number of businesses focused around the niche that you want to thrive in, but know that the presence of competition is never a bad thing. Having competitors means that there is profit to be made within the niche you have chosen. However, you have to undergo a thorough analysis of competing websites and companies. Here are the steps on how to undertake this endeavor:
- Create a table or spreadsheet and input all the competing sites you have found.
- Make yourself unique. Is that an opportunity for you to stand out from the crowd? Find if there is a way to differentiate yourself and make something unique,
- Here are some ways that can set you apart from your competitors:
- High quality content: It’s simple to beat your competition when you can create content that is consistently better and easier for your customer base to consume. You demonstrate the time and effort into creating better content, which relates to the quality of product/service you produce. This makes customers and clients have more trust and connection to the standard of work you develop.
- Be Transparent: Being authentic and honest constructs a warmer, more inviting feeling toward potential clients. On the opposite end, other sites might feel cold and overly corporate, trying to take your hard earned money without giving you a familial feeling in the process.
- Find Great Keywords: If you’ve discovered keywords that have high search volume with little competition for paid advertising, you have a great opportunity to upset the market and bring organic traffic to your site.
Determine the profitability of your niche
- Even if you haven’t narrowed down your list to a single topic area, you have probably found a couple of ideas you feel pretty good about. Now, it’s critical to understand how much money you can make within your niche. Clickbank is a great place to start your search.
- Browse top products in your category. No offers = not a good sign. Chances are, it might mean that nobody has been able to monetize the niche.
- If you search shows up a decent number of products, but not an overwhelming amount – you’re in luck! Write down the price points so that you can price your own products in a competitive manner.
- Keep in mind that you have to start your business with a product/service offering on your own. Partner with product creators, advertisers, and other site owners in your niche to begin generating commissions while you work on your own unique solutions.
Testing, testing, testing!
- One simple way to test your idea is to set up a landing page (see page XX) for pre-sales of a product you’re developing. You can also drive traffic to this page with paid advertising.
- Even if you get a low amount of pre-sales, this doesn’t mean you are not in a great niche. Like with everything, you need time to develop. It could be that your message is not geared toward your customer base in the best way, or you haven’t found the right combination for your offer. By leveraging A/B testing, you can optimize conversions and find out whether or not there is anything stopping your customer base from taking action.
Final Words
- Once you have results and have confirmed the viability of a niche, start developing a fully fledged website. Early on, using platforms such as Etsy and Shopify have great benefits due to their large number of customer bases. However, over time they do take more of a percentage from your sales. For repeat clients, have them go to your website and buy directly from you, so you can keep 100% of your proftts.
- You will learn how to create and maintain a blog, to generate more traffic with your content to boost revenue and scale upward, which will be discussed in Chapter 3.
There is no perfect process for finding a niche. You’ll have to research and continually learn about every nuisance there is regarding your niche. However, it is better to take action, rather than to plan every single waking second. As a businessperson and aspiring entrepreneur, you need to become a good self-starter and to maintain your momentum moving onwards. Learning and growing from experience will always be much more rewarding, than just planning.