You want to start a business, but the thing that's holding you back is the market niche you know you need to choose. And, honestly, this can be tricky: You could list all of your interests and passions and still come away feeling as if you haven't hit upon the singular thing you were meant to do.
If you're struggling to decide, or you need more data to work with, use the following checklist to find your niche.
Sit down, clear your mind, and start thinking about your interests.
Make a note of all your passions and interests.
Look at interests that overlap or compliment each other.
Identify problems you could solve within your potential niches.
Think about how you might solve the problems you’ve found.
Discard any niche ideas where you can’t find a problem you can solve.
Make a list of top competitor sites.
Analyze those competitor sites.
Think about what you could do differently or better.
Analyze the Google results page to see if the niche is too competitive.
Keyword research is all about understanding what people are searching for – you want to find keywords with a high search volume, because that means lots of people are searching for it.
Try out a few of the keyword tools, such as Google Trends, Google Adwords: Keyword Planner.
Discover which keywords you want to target.
Check how popular or competitive your keywords are.
Research your niche’s profitability, check out trending products on Amazon, Google, and eBay, identify best-selling items on competitor sites, use websites such as Exploding Topics to find out what’s hot, and sites like Clickbank to see how much certain products can make.
Consider your target audience,think about your target audience’s age, gender, lifestyle, pain points, budget, hobbies, culture, and more, so that you can assess how best to build your niche.
Think about what your unique selling point may be, ask yourself: what value can I add to this niche?
Refer back to your competitor analysis to identify possible areas where you can improve or stand out.
Decide how you could add extra value to your niche, think outside the box, and look for gaps in your niche that your own unique skills can fill.
One of the best ways to do this is to set up an online store or website accepting pre-orders of your product or service. That way, you can get an idea of how much interest your idea generates and go from there.
Don't give up if you don't have instant success with your sales. It requires time to generate an audience for your product.
You can tweak your niche marketing strategy over time. Utilize the information about your traffic on Google Analytics tools.
You can also experiment with A/B testing which allows you to determine what you're doing right, and what could be improved.
When you are launching (or re-launching) a blog or business, you may find yourself spending endless hours researching, planning, and then researching some more. Don’t get stuck in research mode. Give yourself a finite amount of time for the research and planning (i.e. set a deadline). Once that time is up, start, launch, ship. It doesn’t have to be perfect.
Online marketing involves many different factors. If people within your niche are not keeping up with the times, you can easily get the advantage. Simply set your website up with a marketer’s mind. Learn about digital marketing, put some time and effort, so you can build enough skill to make your website truly profitable.