Finding Your Niche - How to Find
Your Perfect Niche Market
For (More) Fun and (Greater) Profits
Working in a niche makes you an expert, an authority figure and gives you more profits and lets you have more fun. To gain maximum profits you need to focus on a particular niche rather than an entire field or industry. Here's a detailed article on why niche marketing is so profitable. - http://www.nobleriver.com/Articles/ArticleDisplay.aspx?Article=niche-marketing-for-greater-profits.htm
Finding a niche that is suitable for you.
It is important to find a niche that is profitable for you. Its even more important that you enjoy doing it. To a lesser scale, you need to know about the niche; that is you should have some kind of past experience in the niche either as a user or as a provider. Let's talk about how you might identify a few possible niches that may be suitable for you.
Identify your passions and hobbies.
The first thing you need to do is to wite down your hobbies and passions. To help you get started, look back over the past year and list out all the things you did for fun.
Your list might have stuff like bowling, hiking, wood-working, fishing, painting, body building, trading stocks etc.
Then, you need to list them in the order of your level of passion. Those you are most passionate about must come at the top.
How do you know you are passionate?
Well, if you are spending any money on a hobby, its almost certain you are passionate about it.
Finding a market.
The next thing you do is to find a market. A market is a place where there are a lot of people who are passionate about the same things as you are and are willing to pay money to make following their passion more enjoyable. Now you could go about finding your market in a number of ways.
1) Look at existing online markets like Ebay and Amazon.com.
Do they have categories for subjects you are passionate about? Do they have a lot of products being sold? How hot are the auctions on Ebay? Do they have many people bidding?
The more the number of competitors, the bigger your market size. The bigger your market, the bigger your share of the pie.
2)Go to Magazines.com and see the most popular magazines in your field.
3)Walk down to your local bookstore and browse the magazines shelf. Some big bookstores have entire shelves devoted to your passion. Spend your time going through the magazines to see which articles interest you. Read the headlines and spend time looking at the magazine covers. Talk to people who come and pick these magazines up.
Talk to the store keeper and find out which magazines fly off the shelf and which ones go unsold.
Buy the ones that catch your interest and take them home. Page through the magazines and take notes. Cut out the ads that interest you and file them.
4)See which advertisements appear in these magazines and find out who the major advertisers are. Google them and find how long they have been in business and what their best selling items are. Go to their websites and nose around a bit. This will give you a better idea of what to look for.
5)Then go down to your county library and ask for back issues of such magazines. See which ads have been running consistently for a few months. They must be making money to keep running them over a period of time.
Narrow down your niche
Once you have decided on a certain market, try to narrow down your field of interest into a small section of the market.If fishing is your area of interest, try to focus on one area such as bass fishing, carp fishing or fly fishing. If trading is what you like to do, pick either shares or options or derivates etc.
Again, make sure there is a big enough market for your services. You may even pick one where you see not many people providing solutions or services.
Scan ads in the local newspaper and see which ones get repeated over a period of time.
Visit online forums and see what people are passionate about. Learn what their common gripes are and see if there is anything you can solve depending on your past expertise.
If you already have a customer base, do a survey and get their opinion. See what other products they would like to see to complement what you are already supplying them with.
Talk to your competitor and do a survey on his customers. Hire a list and do a marketing survey on them.
Do keyword research.
Keyword research refers to finding the number of times certain keywords have been used in searches.
Google has a free keyword tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool not only tells you how many searches have been done on a tool, it also tells you the comparative advertiser competition on Adwords.
Another keyword tool you may want to use is WordTracker - from www.wordtracker.com. They have their own database of keywords collected from millions of searches over the years.
Once you have identified a niche that may be profitable, you need to create a product or service. Its quite easy to ask around in forums if anyone would be interested in a new product like this. Ask if anyone knows where you can get such a product and you will have more people responding.
To test your idea profitably, you can use Google Adwords. First set a small budget and see how much response you get and then proceed on a bigger scale. Test the waters by dipping your toe rather than diving in head first.
Now that you have the basics of how to find your niche, its time to sit down and start at Step I. Happy huntings!