Online Success Series Part One: Do You Really *Need* a Niche?
There are MILLIONS of businesses active on the Web today. But the amount of businesses that are aiming directly at a market are FAR fewer. And those that had done research to ensure that the market they’re targeting actually EXISTS?
Well, the number just got MUCH smaller!
The true secret to creating a successful business is to find a market to target BEFORE you build a business. That way, you know from the beginning that you had a potential customer out there looking for exactly what you had to offer.
So how would we define a niche market? A niche market is a group of people looking for the solution to a specific problem… ideally, a problem that YOU can solve with a product or service!
It’s quite simple: if no one is looking for what you’re offering, you’re going to had a hard time selling it!
If you ARE targeting a niche market and hadn’t seen too much success, you may be targeting a market that is too broad — which leads to an overload of competition. On the other hand, you could be targeting a niche that is far too narrow — which leads to a lack of customers!
The key is to find the “sweet spot” where your ideal audience lies.
For example, if you type “garden plants” into Google, you get 20,900,000 results. The odds of standing out in that search are extremely low, especially since you’re up against big gardening companies or wholesalers who can offer more products at a lower price than any small business can.
However, “garden plants for warm climates” cuts that number down to a mere 159,000 results — which represents a dramatic reduction in potential competition… with a large potential target group still remaining!
By addressing more specific concerns or needs on your site — without narrowing your focus so sharply that you only had two potential customers! — you create a connection with your visitors that encourages them to buy from you… instead of looking elsewhere.
Your first step to finding an active, targetable niche is to use a keyword research tool like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery to see what kinds of things people are actually searching for on the Web — things that you can provide. You’ll see that the words they use reveal the kinds of problems they’re trying to solve, and once you know that, you can zero in on particular niches with particular needs with a product or service.
(That’s why Keyword Discovery is built into our top-to-bottom business builder software package, BeBiz.
BeBiz is designed to take you from the baby steps of building an Internet business, all the way to having a fully-functional website that draws traffic, drives conversions, and takes payments.
Check it out to get started today)
We’d say that at least 60% of the issues we see with new businesses are tied directly to either too-broad or too-narrow niches. And people often give up before they realize that their niche needs a crucial tune-up, or that they need a new focus altogether.
Fortunately, there are still MILLIONS of niches left to target, and new, successful businesses being launched to reach them every single day.
Maybe it’s time one of them was yours…
