Finding Your Niche
When trying to figure out which niche to go after, think about the following:
What do I love to do the most?
What am I most passionate about in life?
What subjects do I have strong interest in?
What am I naturally good at or have an instinct for and enjoy?
If I were to wake up in the morning and choose to do one thing, what exciting thing would that be?
What would express my creative intention, and bring out the best in me?
How can I benefit myself and others?
To some of you, the answers may come very easily.
For others, it may require a little bit of soul-searching and self-discovery to come up with a list of niches we think we would like to work in.
The important thing is to first jot down all your ideas, then do your research.
Some of the ideas might be great, but have a lot of competition. You might have to go to a sub-niche to get a real sense of the market and be able to sell into it. For example, dog training is very broad, with lots of competition. But dog training for puppies, narrower, and for the Bichon Frise, narrower still.
There are over 1.8 million sites related to the Bichon Frise, and 240k on Bichon Frise training. There are 21k on Bichon Frise grooming tips. Anyone who has ever owned one would most likely be interested in this topic if they want to save time and money. So you’ve just identified two potentially lucrative niches.
Also look not just at the organic search engine page results, (SERPs) but the pay per click ads running along the top and the right hand side of the page. Are there a lot of ads? Well, these people are not throwing money away. Sure, there is competition, but they must be making money from running those ads, selling ebooks, dvds, and so on.
Once you have identified a couple of promising niches, the next step will be to become an affiliate. In that way, you will be able to start making money right away in your business. Yes, you might want to develop your own product later on so you will be able to keep 100% of the profits for yourself, but keep in mind that you always want to have a profit mind-set in your business.
That is, to make sure you earn enough money to pay all your monthly expenses like hosting fees and so forth, and still have something left over for PPC and other marketing and promotion to drive traffic to your site.
So if you are going to put up a site, and try to get people to visit it, make sure they have something to do when they get there:
–give their email address in exchange for a free download
–promote an affiliate product or two so they will buy a book or DVD from your site, and you will get a share of the profits through an automated revenue stream–in other words, they do all the fulfillment, credit card transactions and so forth. You just drive the traffic, convert it, and get the money deposited into your account.
We will talk more about affiliates and how to choose your products in later articles. For the moment, it is enough to start thinking about the first niche you want to be in, and all the keywords related to it, which you will be using to build your site using SEO strategies, and will also use as your PPC keywords to start driving traffic to your site once you think it is ready to be launched.
If you’re having a hard time finding the answers, just get your mind going in that general direction by pondering on the above questions, especially before you go to bed at night (and until you fall asleep.) The power of focus is such that it will get your mind working in the background (while you’re sleeping) to bring the answers to you.
For now, you can simply start by asking…
“What are my favorite hobbies, interests, activities, etc.”
Or…
“What are some things I don’t know yet but have a burning desire to learn more about?”
Start a list and add all your favorites to it.
