WHAT IS A NICHE?

If you want to make money online, you must have something to sell.

It could be a product or a service. The first thing you have to do is determine which NICHE you are going to sell your products to. Picking a niche is the starting point of successful internet marketing.

So what is a niche? By definition, a niche is a segment of a larger market. More specifically, it is a FOCUSSED, TARGETABLE portion of a market. A niche is just a fancy way of describing a group of people with a particular interest. These people are a tightly knit group of people with a specific NEED or WANT. This is perhaps best illustrated by an example:

Let us take the BROAD TERM OR NICHE OF “Internet Marketing”. At the time of writing this, there were 161 million results for “internet marketing” on Google. Trying to compete in this broad niche would be almost impossible because of the large volume of competitors.

So a better way would be to find a sub niche or smaller segment of this broad niche called “Internet Marketing”. One could then try say, “Internet marketing for newbie’s”. A Google search now returns 3 million results. While we still have millions of competitors there is still FAR FEWER COMPETITORS THAN THE BROAD SEARCH FOR ‘INTERNET MARKETING”

One could break this sub niche down even further. For example one may choose to target “Internet marketing advertising”. I got 1,38 million searches. Again less than the two broader niches above.

Guess what, internet advertising can be broken down further into say banner advertising or pay per click (PPC). There are people who are experts at Google PPC advertising, also known as Google Adwords. My search for “advertising with PPC” yielded only 29,600 results. I am sure by now that you get the message.

WHAT IS THE GOAL?

The trick is thus to find a niche that is not too competitive but that still has enough people interested in that niche for you to make money. To make a real long term sustainable business out of your niche, you should try to pick a niche that you can market numerous products to so as to improve the lifetime value of your customers. You are looking for people with a need, want or problem that they are prepared to spend a lot of money on, over and over again.

The internet marketing niche is an excellent example of this.

Once you have narrowed down your list of proposed niches, you need to establish whether there is in fact a demand for your niche or product. Often times, the more competitors there are, the better! Why is this? Because it proves that there are people in your niche that are prepared to spend money otherwise you would not have any competition.

If the numbers stack up, then you need to procure (create or source) the product or service to satisfy the wants, needs or desires of your niche. The easiest way to do this is to simply ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS WHAT THEY WANT!

You then produce the product or service that fills their needs exactly.