Niche Finding – Discover What Works Best for You.

There are many ways to find a niche that you can market, here I will give you some inside advice on how to come up with ideas and how to implement them.

What’s a NICHE anyway?     

A niche is a product category area that you are trying to market. Take fishing for example the area fishing is far too big to be able to market effectively as there are way too many subcategories and departments to cover within that niche. You can break it down however into smaller more manageable parts for example fly fishing or sea fishing. Although to manage properly these are again too big.

If we take fly fishing you can go deeper to say fly fishing in the sea. Now we are starting to get somewhere. It is smaller than the parent categories but not too small that it can be competed against too easily.  What I mean here is you have wiggle room to move in different directions and keep the niche vibrant. Again for clarity sea fly fishing has many sub-topics, fly rods, reels, fly lines, target species, destinations, clothing, books, and DVDs  etc.

So if you included some or all of these you could build a good authority site on sea fly fishing.  If however you go deeper to say sea fly fishing rods and worked on that you would be working on what would be called a micro-niche. These can work and are quite lucrative but they can be short-lived. As with the level above you don’t have any wiggle room and nowhere to go if another authority site takes your traffic.

Example 1 , say you are a programmer in java. You have several years of experience in

writing code and know the ins and outs of building applets. You could build a niche around writing posts helping others how to build procedures and applets how to work with the java executing code and distributing finished projects.

These helpful posts to a lot of people are important when learning a new programming language. Working from books it can be very difficult to get the right results. However, a niche website with someone on hand to help and assist on projects could be invaluable to students or qualified programmers alike. While building this niche you could provide links to various amazon books etc or charge for time working on code for people. Now I know this is not up everyone’s street but to some coding is fun and so why not make a passive income from it.

Example 2, you like painting with watercolors. Why not set up a site showing your readers the steps to take to produce a complete painting.

Knowledge about canvas, paint, brushes, topics to paint, painting holidays, etc, etc, You could build up a good following if you provide good quality advice on these things and maybe sell some of your own work in the posts or affiliate to Amazon for brushes, paint, canvas, books, DVDs, etc.  I am no expert on the subject but to me that could be a nice niche for someone to use.

Tips on how to “CHOOSE A NICHE”

When trying to choose a niche the first thing I would ask you to do is get a piece of paper and write down all your hobbies including sports etc. Any interests you have or anything you are anyway advanced or well trained in.

OK  now hopefully you will have a list of a dozen or so. (don’t worry if you only have a couple there are other ways to create ones that we will look at later) Now I want you to number them from 1 to whatever you have making 1 the most important (or passionate) to you and the last the least important. Here we now have a list of possible niches.

Right off the bat not every niche will be a good one to work on so we need to do a bit more work to see if these are possible. As Amazon is a good place to start we can use their bestsellers lists. Go to Amazon and choose a category you are interested in then choose best sellers, should be there beside the category and click on that. There you will see what is hot right now in that category. That will give you ideas on products to review and sell.  It is also a good way to keep abreast of what is hot in your niche as things are changing all the time and new products are being released daily.

There are more ways to come up with a niche market place but I would advise going with one you are passionate about this way you will already know quite a bit about it and should be able to write out articles and posts on the niche without too much research or thought. The more you like the subject the more you will want to write and talk about it.

This can save a lot of time at the beginning building content for your niche as research can eat up time like a hungry dog and can frustrate a newbie into despair and failure. You can move into other niches when you have learned all you need to know from building your first niche.

One word of caution before we finish. I would avoid three niche marketplaces as a beginner which are health wealth and relationships, these three are very lucrative but are also very competitive. You will find it very hard to make any headway if you start in these.

Any questions please leave me a comment and I will get back to you.

Mark Thompson