How To Find The Perfect Niche: A Step-By-Step Guide
Internet marketing is not like marketing with brick and mortar businesses, on the web the best way to find your audience is to market to a small group of people with specific interests, this is called a niche.
It is easier said than done though, because not every niche is profitable or monetizable, or even big enough to sustain a single business.
I wanted to make a step-by-step guide for people who are interested in internet marketing but are not sure how to pick the right niche.
The Benefits Of Niche Marketing Compared To Mass Marketing
When you put niche marketing up against mass marketing, the differences are that with mass marketing you have the potential to reach a wider audience but the problem is you are competing with bigger and more established websites for your piece of the pie.
With niche marketing you don’t need to spend tons of money like you do with mass marketing and the traffic you get is more reliable because there aren’t other sites trying to take your customers, so the playing field is more even.
Also keep in mind that if you do start out with a niche site, you don’t need to keep it that way, as you grow your audience, you can use the money you’re earning to grow your business with advertising and gain the benefits of reaching a wider audience like a mass marketed site would.
Here’s Step Number One, Build Your Niche Around What You’re Familiar With
Find a topic that you’ve been interested in for a long time, something that you can talk for hours about and never run out of things to say because you’re so passionate about it.
If you choose a niche that you just got interested in but don’t know much about then you are gonna have a hard time coming up with original ideas for your site.
Also if you’re not 100% on board with your niche choice then it’s going to feel like a massive chore when you have to create content every day for it.
Step Two, Find How You Can Best Provide Value To Those In Your Niche Market
Once you have your target niche in mind, think of common and not so common problems that the people in your niche face.
Think about the problems you’ve had as well, and how to provide the solutions for them.
A way to do research for this would be to look on forums and question / answer sites (like quora or reddit) for your niche and what people complain most about. Start browsing related topics and ideas will start forming in your head.
Also make sure to use tools like ahrefs, google keyword planner, and “answer the public” to find ideas for your niche.
Step Three, Research Your Competition
When you’ve settled on a niche, you don’t want to invest money in a place where there are too many people fighting for the same small audience.
There’s also a problem when there’s absolutely no competition in the niche, you have to think why that would be, there’s a chance you could be onto something huge but at the same time, you could be looking at a niche that is impossible to monetize. Building a website on this topic expecting to monetize would be like trying to draw blood from a stone.
So use google to search for keywords in your market and see the kinds of sites you are gonna be competing against.
It would be a good idea to write down ideas and notes on what you see the competition doing so you can do it better.
The three “battlefields” you can fight them on are:
- Quality if you don’t have the reach that your competition has, you can beat them on quality, you can go the extra mile with your content by having a nicer site, custom pictures for your articles or longer more, informative posts.
- Image you can choose to be more active on social media and your site to show that you aren’t a big soulless company.
- Price if you offer a service, you should undercut the competition by selling cheaper and providing more (while still remaining profitable), this way the market will have no choice but to go with your offering.
Step Four, Can The Niche Actually Be Monetized?
So after picking your niche, making sure can provide value, and seeing who you’re competing with, it time to see if you can actually make good money in your niche.
The way I do this is by going onto sites like Amazon or clickbank and searching for products in your niche to get ideas on what the profit margins will be and the market potential for the site.
So if you found an idea for your niche and there aren’t any products you can find, you can take it as a sign that either the niche doesn’t have potential or that it is untapped.
If you feel as thought the niche is untapped and there are no products you can promote it with, the best thing to do is create a product yourself that you can use to monetize the niche, such as an e-book, or an online course.
Step Five, Take The Plunge
Now that you have put your thoughts up against all the steps and are confident in your ability to market to this particular niche, it is time to put your ideas into action.
With your new site there are tons of way you can drive free traffic to it or you can research ways to utilize paid traffic methods if you have the cash.
You can only ever truly know if the niche you picked was the right one if you are getting results with it, and actually building something that proves that you are right will feel like an amazing success.
I hope this guide helps you decide on where to plant the seeds of your business and is useful in growing it as well.
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Originally published at https://forgefinancialfreedom.com on September 19, 2019.
