Tag: selecting a niche

Selecting a Niche: Some Starting Points

Before we start searching for your new niche, lets review how the niche marketing process works.

•    Step 1 – You need to pick a viable niche.
•    Step 2 – You need to study and understand the niche.
•    Step 3 – You need to create and/or find a product to promote to this niche. (This is where you provide a solution to them)
•    Step 4 – You design your campaign, copywriting, and drive traffic to your niche website.
•    Step 5 – You generate nice niche profits.

In my next couple of posts we will discover a number of free tools you can use to assist in this process of selecting a niche.  But before we go into depth on using these tools lets start deciding what niche we want to research and develop.

There are 3 main themes that are highly lucrative for niche marketing, that you should be aware of. They are: –

1.    Health
2.    Wealth
3.    Relationships

You can never really go wrong with these as starting points when selecting a niche.  There are always people having problems and desperately looking solutions in all three.

However, these 3 categories mentioned here are very broad. So what you need to do is to use the tools, that will be demonstrated later, to dig deeper into these broad categories before selecting a niche to exploit.

That way you can become the “expert” to provide specific solutions to your new niche easier, faster and better.

In addition to these broad categories you may want to think in terms of broad motivations that people may have within a category.

For example, think of ‘people in transition’. If someone has just lost their job, they are more likely to be searching for solutions and willing to take action when an appropriate solution presents itself.

Another example would be a wife filing for a divorce. This is also a transitional period where the couple may be looking for a specific solution for the family or solutions on how to move forward with their relationship.

Sometimes one side of the couple may even be seeking out advice to get back together with the spouse or partner.

So people in transitions are normally ‘hungry’ because they are desperately in need to get out of their current chaos.

Another lucrative type of market is the ‘in the news trends’. While these may or may not be long lived niches, they can be highly profitable while they are prominent in the public’s mind.

In the news trends are often just a quick dash or sometimes a prolonged situation. Often it’s a wave that needs to be caught. An example of ‘In the news trend’ would be the recent retrenchment and unemployment news.

News stories about the current recession and high unemployment rates are all over the news. These people are currently in chaos. They’ve lost their jobs and need to find a solution as soon as possible to sustain their lifestyle and their monthly commitments.

While this may always be the case to some extent, when you are in a major trend it’s wise to use effective marketing to capitalize on the situation.

Another example might be ‘celebrity diets’.

News about the latest celebrity diets are evident in gossip magazines, TV channels, and on various trend indicators as we will discuss. When you see a trend capturing the media’s attention, it is ‘hot.’   People will very often craze about it during that period of time.

Again it takes some nimbleness, but niche marketers who are prepared to catch and ride on these waves can generate extraordinary niche profits.

So when thinking about effective marketing for a new niche consider not just what niche, but whether you can identify some “moving force” that might motivate people within your new niche to take action.

What Are The Advantages in Niche Marketing?

There are several advantages to our simple marketing plan of focusing on niches online.

The first is that by narrowing our topic to something very specific, we allow ourselves the opportunity to become an expert on that narrow niche. To be effective as a marketer, you want to be seen as an authority, someone you customers can trust. Because trust is a key element of the buyers decision making process.

It’s much easier to learn everything important there is to know about Ice Fishing lures and gear than it is to learn everything there is to know about fishing in general.

By selecting a niche and learning about it through research, you will be viewed as an expert who provides solutions for your audience.

Additionally, by focusing on a smaller niche market you will have more targeted customers and less competition. This means you will be in a position to be the dominant force within your niche market.

In other words, you will be the big fish in the little pond, as opposed to being a little fish in a big one.

In niche marketing, the concept is first to identify an audience or customer base. Then to study and understand them so that you have a good handle on what they are looking for, what they are hungry for. And then you feed it to them, by promoting a relevant product to meet that demand. That product may be someone else’s or your own, but the key is that before you go to the trouble of promoting it, you have already identified the people who want it, and understand how and why it will meet their needs. It then is a simple matter to sell it.

The primary advantage of niche marketing is that it reduces resistance to the sales process. You are no longer trying to get people to buy something they don’t want. Instead you are helping them solve their specific problem. As such you become their hero, which is a far more satisfying outcome.