Home Based Business – What Is A Good Niche, Anyhow?
By Garth Hopewell | November 11th, 2008There’s a lot of talk about niche marketing on the internet. And with good reason – there is good money in the niches. But only if you can find a “good” niche.
Without getting that right, your online business is not likely to be particularly profitable.
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So what is a GOOD niche?
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What are the indicators that a niche is “good”, which for marketers means “profitable”? What should you be looking for when you are in the process of selecting your niche market?
1. A good niche is one that already EXISTS. The point here being that you don’t have to try to create the demand. It’s already there in the market place. You can see it, for example by doing a Google search. Perhaps you can even measure the size of the market. One way to do that is by getting a count of the number of people who have entered the main keywords into a search engine over the last month. There’s no guessing here.
2. A good niche is easily IDENTIFIABLE. Children with asthma is an easy to identify target market, whereas people who rub olive oil onto their potatoes before roasting them would be a lot harder to find. Who knows, there might be more olive oil cooks than asthmatic children, but where do they congregate? Where would you go to meet up with the olive oil chefs as a group? – which is something you must do if you are to be able to reach them. And that leads on to the next point…
3. A good niche is easily TARGETABLE. Young men who ride bikes competitively on the weekend are easy to target – through their bike clubs. Home brew fans can be contacted through the suppliers of beer and wine brewing supplies. On the other hand, there might be a huge crowd of people who draw pictures of clouds but how would you find them? Through art supply shops maybe, but I’m sure you see my point about being EASY to target?
Get the idea?
The great big underlying question so far is whether your home business can connect with your market, because you cannot serve them if you cannot reach them.
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Part 2: What is a REALLY GOOD niche?
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4. We can now go a little further and say that a really good niche is narrow in focus but BIG IN POPULARITY. The more people in your niche, the profitable it can be… other things being equal (and they aren’t always).
5. Better still, you want your prospects to be PASSIONATE.
6. Lastly, you want to be able to reach the people in your market economically, so there is a profit left at the end of the day after all your expenses. If it costs $4 to reach your average customer and then you make $4 from her, that’s plainly not what you’re looking for.
Niche marketing is the most targeted marketing there is, and can also be the most profitable. Use the points in this article to help assess any niche you are considering for your home based business.
Finally, a suggestion…
Make today the day you TAKE ACTION what you have learned in this article.
More information:
niche markets
Tags: business, Home Business, home;business, internet business, Internet Marketing, make money online, niche market research, niche marketing, niche markets
