How to Choose Your Niche

Starting an online business means marketing a product or service online. One of your first steps will be to define your niche, your unique corner of the Web.

Once you declare your niche, two important events unfold.

First, your audience (customers, clients, potential site members) can begin to discover who you are and where to find you.

Second, your marketing angle becomes clear.

Defining your niche is like focusing your camera on one tree, and one tree only, in the forest. However, it isn’t about choosing which tree you like best. When starting an online business, focus on a niche where your strengths lie.

Ask yourself

• What are you knowledgeable about or experienced in?
• What are you passionate about?
• What are you particularly well-suited to offer?
• What do you do well?

But wait, what if your niche is too big?

Here’s an example of how to narrow your niche:

Let’s say you have knowledge or experience in a general subject, such as real estate. The entire subject of real estate is too general to do you much good as you start an online business.

• You don’t want to squeeze yourself into a niche that is already crowded with people marketing to the same general audience.

Many people offering the same thing may water down your ability to succeed.

However, if you are determined to create a niche for yourself in a highly competitive area such as real estate, you can still succeed.

Your challenge would be to find a need within that niche and fill it.

For example, you might start an online business that specializes in local real estate only, or in eco-friendly commercial buildings.

Well-known personal development author and blogger Steve Pavlina recommends choosing a niche you won’t easily burn out on. He has a good point there, since the World Wide Web is currently a medium of the written word. That is, as far as the search engines are concerned, pictures do not count, relevant words do.

To enable searchers to find your Web site, you will write hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of posts and articles about your subject.

• Therefore, it’s not only important to choose something you are knowledgeable about, it should also be a subject about which you are fairly deliriously curious. (Writing is one very good way to learn about your subject. You will learn lots.)

In order for a subject to allow for and encourage your curiosity, it must be big enough. Your subject, or your niche, must also be big enough so that enough people will search for it — and remain interested enough to eventually become your customers.

When starting an online business your goal is to attract a sizable audience who needs and desires your service or product.

• What happens if your niche is too small?

Here’s a true story to illustrate that mistake:

An enterprising and imaginative entrepreneur downtown opened a restaurant. So far so good, right? Bear in mind that most restaurants offer specialties, delicious dishes that give the place a certain desirable character all its own.

In any town you may find, within the general food category: Mexican restaurants, Caribbean food, Thai kitchens, Japanese, and down-home Southern cuisine, just to name a few.

This particular restaurant owner decided to specialize in breakfast food and close shop for lunch and dinner. Still a pretty good shot at success. Lots of people eat breakfast out. However, he chose as his breakfast offering, cereal.

No eggs, no toast, no hash browns on the side. That’s right, no muffins, no jam.

Simply cereal, numerous varieties of corn flakes, granola and rice puffs. He called his breakfast joint the Cereal Bar.

The Cereal Bar opened, and closed, in a matter of mere weeks.

Entrepreneurs take risks. We have always tinkered at the edges of what is possible.

It is our job to stretch, burst and redefine boundaries.

Sometimes we take risks that launch us over the moon, making us wildly successful. Sometimes we wind up eating our own cornflakes. The Cereal Bar, let’s face it, had its shot at culinary success just as has another niche restaurant downtown, the Noodle Shop.

The difference is, the Noodle Shop is thriving and the Cereal Bar is past-tense. It is possible for a niche to be too small to succeed.

• Choose a niche about which you have plenty to say.

• Showcase your knowledge, experience and passion.

If you can’t decide between two subjects you feel strongly about, try free-writing or brainstorming about both. See which one leads you to more interesting things to say.

Ask others for honest feedback about your niche’s commercial viability.

We entrepreneurs are notoriously optimistic. We can easily overlook substantial challenges, merrily whistling past a graveyard of beginner’s mistakes.

• Therefore, it’s imperative to seek an outside, objective opinion when starting an online business.

Explore your reasons (aside from earning money) for choosing a particular niche for your online business start up. For example, if you know that it is important to you to serve your community, you should explore ways to do so within your niche.

Choose a subject that allows for your creative freedom and also has potential to attract a wide base of advertisers.

Engage your heart and your head when choosing your niche and starting an online business.