If you have ever studied economics, you’ll know how important it is for businesses to have a niche. Without it, business professionals lack branding, expertise, specialisation and sophistication. With it, they are perceived as experts: efficient and effective. People trust niche businesses.

The same is applicable for your online ventures. In fact, the search engines picked up on this long ago, and began ranking sites and pages partially using the basis of their focus on a certain niche (there are many other factors, but this is a major contributing one). This is why you often read blogs and articles about keyword density. Basically, it means the keywords that point to a certain niche are regularly repeated throughout the article. The search engines understand this to mean the article is very focused on that certain topic, and hence will rank a page higher on the basis that it is in a niche. 

While search engines are one major player that we, as internet entrepreneurs, must appease, a niche also helps your online business gain respectability and a reputation from visitors and customers. Needless to say, picking the right niche is important.

So how do we go about picking the right niche? How do we find something that we don’t burn out working on? How do find a niche that we can build up business is? How can we find a niche where we stand out? How can we make money through the niche? These are all questions we need to ask ourselves when building our online businesses. Let’s have a look at Four Simple Steps that you can take today to help you clarify a suitable niche.

1. Brainstorm. Come up with every idea you can possibly think of. The rules are: there are no rules! Everything is a valid option in the brainstorming stage. Be as crazy as you want to, as long as you get a whole tonne of ideas on paper! I’d recommend you go and do that right now. Now!

After that, you’ll have to ask yourself the following questions. Each question will probably knock out a few ideas. As you assess all the ideas you’ve come up with, ask yourself:

2. Do you really care about the topic? If you do, you will find learning fun, and working in that field exciting. If it bores you, there is no point in working in it. Trust me, you’ll soon end up burnt out and you’ll have wasted much of your time with little results. People can sense passion, and the lack of it turns visitors away.

3. What is your competition like? How full is the market? To get a good indication of niche’s that are “saturated” with competitors, do a few Google searches on the topics you are interested in. If you see many ads down the right hand side of the page, there are probably already many competitors in that niche, and if you’re starting out there’s not going to be much point in trying to challenge them.
If you see a few other competitors, explore ways you might be able to deliver something within that niche that is unique to yourself. You can’t seal a market share of visitors from your competitors without offering your customers something more, better, or different.

4. Can it earn money? If you are planning to give away free content or online products, carefully investigate how much money you could be making from this niche. Different niche’s have different attributes that determine their effectiveness online. For example, if you are insanely interested in furniture & carpentry, you might make more money selling an eBook on “Restoring Furniture” rather than making chairs and trying to post them all over the country!

People could write whole books on picking niches, but these are the main major factors they all consider. How these practically apply to your online business is up to you. You now have the principles to put this into practice! With a combination of ideas, passion, uniqueness and suitability, you’ll have found a profitable niche found no time!

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