Welcome to Step 3, the third article in a seven part series that explains how you can make money online by starting an online business.
So what is a niche? Niche in marketing terms actually means a distinct segment of a market. For example, if we take the health market to represent all different topics to do with health - then weight loss could be a niche within the health market. So in terms of making money online by creating your own online business, niche refers to the particular subject matter that your website/blog is going to be about. Your area of expertize if you like.
So what are you good at... golf, playing the guitar, sales? Alternatively, what experiences have you gone through that may be of use to others... have you gotten over a divorce, beaten cancer, or found a good way to cope with, or beat depression? Is there a topic that you are really interested in, or passionate about, like... east Indian cooking, rehabbing houses, collecting jokes from around the world? Another great way to find a niche is to partner with someone who already has 'access' to a niche. One of your friend's, for example, might be five foot ten - but is able to dunk a basketball! I'm sure there are millions of people who are around that height, and would love to learn how to jump high enough to dunk. What I am getting at here, is that you need to select a niche in which you will be able to offer some value. The easiest and most popular way to do this is to show people how to do something, or solve a particular problem or 'pain'.
OK, say you are an expert on the life of Katherine Parr, the sixth wife of King Henry the eighth. Would that make a good niche for your website/blog? Well, I'm sure it would be interesting for a very small, select handful, of history buffs - but the simple answer would have to be 'no'. The reason being, that in order for you to have a chance to monetize your website/blog, your niche will really need to satisfy a couple of criteria. It will need to be large enough to support all the players/competition involved in that niche, and it will need to consist of people with expendable income.
Still not sure what niche to go for? No problem. Let's do a little research and see what niches are popular, and maybe a light bulb will go off in your head. There are already many companies out there that spend millions of dollars on research into what people are looking for, and what solutions they can provide. The most readily available sources are magazines and books. If a company takes the time to create a paid magazine or book, then you can bet that there is a market out there for that topic. This fulfills the criteria we mentioned above where a niche has to be large enough and have expendable income. If you look up 'how to books' in Google you will find an assortment of good books from where you can drill down into their list of categories to find useful niches. So magazines and books are great resources to help in your search for a niche.
Since you are going to be operating online, it would be nice to know how many people are actually searching online for the niche you have selected. This will indicate the approximate size of the market. Google has a great keyword search tool that will tell you how many people search for your particular keyword (niche) every month. It will also provide a basic indicator (low, medium, high) as to whether that keyword (niche) has a lot of competition, or other people like you in the same niche.
So for example, if you do a search for the keyword 'migraine cure' using the Google Keywords Tool you will see that there are approximately 74,000 global monthly searches and the competition is medium. This tells us that the market is very large, but there is quite a lot of competition. Ideally, we would like to have a large market, anywhere above say 4,000 global monthly searches, with low competition.
All the best with your search for a relevant niche!
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