Internet Business-Selecting Your Niche!
One of the things that I get a lot of questions about from new Internet business people is about niche selection. Selecting a niche for your business is one of the first steps that you must take as you get ready to start your new business. It’s an important step but not one that should bog down you progress as it often does with new entrepreneurs.
The first thing that we need to understand is what a niche is and how to identify a niche. Once you understand that you can begin to move forward with the process of selecting a niche for your Internet business. So with that in mind, here is my definition of a niche market…
Niche definition;
A niche is a market or sub sector of a market that can be defined and targeted. For example, we might say that Internet marketing is a niche. But in reality it is a very big market and encompasses many smaller more defined markets or niches like blogging, traffic generation, copy writing etc.
Now if we look at these sub market examples we could break them down even farther. For example if you type the phrase “website traffic” into “google” and scroll to the bottom we will get some suggestions for additional related phrases. These are phrases that people actually type in to their browser. Therefore these are phrases that could represent some possible niches. (Understand that these are only examples) Let’s take a look at what google gives us…
website traffic report
free website traffic
increase website traffic
targeted website traffic
website traffic generator
Now we have a list of terms that we can begin to work with if we are looking at website traffic as a possible niche. Website traffic is still pretty broad and has a lot of competition with over 65 million competing pages listed in google.
If we look at the term “free website traffic”, we still have over 59 million competing pages in google. That is a whole lot of competition to take on for a new Internet business, especially if you are new to the world of Internet business. Is it an impossible niche to take on, absolutely not! Will you have to work hard to win a spot in that niche, you bet you will but it can be done.
Just to ease you mind a bit we will take another look at the phrase “free website traffic”, this time with the quotes and we will see that now there are 408,000 competing pages. This tells us that there are 408,000 pages listed on google that are optimized for that phrase. What does that mean to you? It means that if you want to compete in that market and for
that phrase you only really have to beat 407,990 pages to make the first page of google. I know that may seem like a lot but it is doable and much better than 59 million pages.
Where to start?
Now that you understand a niche, where do you start your search for YOUR niche? It’s time to look inside your self. That’s right, look at what you know and what you are passionate about.
Make a list of possible topics and then start looking at the search results for some related searches. Look at the number of competing page (but don’t let that number scare you off). Look at the sites that are listed on the first page of search results. See what they are selling and how they are marketing.
Look at the sponsored ads on the top and right side of the page. What are they selling and is there plenty of advertisers? These Internet business people are paying each time someone clicks on their ad. If they are not making money, they won’t be able to run that ad for very long. This is always a very good indicator of whether a niche is profitable.
Where to look for ideas;
Here are some suggested places that you can look for ideas.
Google Zeitgeist
Allows you check out the hottest search trends at Google Zeitgeist.
Yahoo! Buzz
Look for more hot trends and ideas at Yahoo Buzz.
Lycos Top 50
like Google Zeitgeist, here you can review the latest trends and look for hot topics to explore further
Ebay Pulse
What I will do is select the category first (using the topics I’ve The eBay Pulse site is a great place to start looking at sub-niches.gathered from looking at the previous sites), then look for profitable sub-niches by then selecting a sub-category.
eBay also puts out a PDF report of their hottest categories each month, available at
Ebay Hot Items.
Amazon
Now that you have some ideas of niches or sub niches, Amazon is a great place to see what currently exists for any given sub-niche. Chances are, the more books there are written on that subject, the more that market spends on those topics.
The bottom line in niche selection is to pick a niche that you know or at least have a lot of interest in and one that spends money. You need to enjoy your niche because you will be spending a lot of time writing about it in your new Internet business. You also need to know that your niche is willing to spend money because that is how you
will get paid through your new Internet business.
To your Internet success,
Dale
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