What is a Niche?
When you first start your online business, choosing a niche is probably one of the hardest things to do. So first, let’s take a look at what a niche is.
According to Merriam-Webster, it means that a business’s products or services can succeed by being sold to a particular group of people. So a niche can be described a service or product that people are looking for.
In other words, think about who your audience is. Who are you trying to help or sell to? What do you have to offer?
There’s more to it than that though. You also want a subject you can be passionate about or at least a subject you want to learn more about. You’re going to be writing a lot of articles about your niche, you don’t want to “dry up” after a few posts!
You want something which will inspire you to work on your website, this will come through in your writing and enable you to connect with your readers. It also comes back to why you are doing this as we mentioned here.
Find a Niche
Are you having trouble deciding on a niche? One way to look is by using a diagram.
Draw this set of circles on a piece of paper. Pick a subject you think might interest you and that goes in the center (your blog). In the outer circles you will think of three topics to discuss relating to the center topic. Areas 1, 2 and 3 are where these ideas overlap.
This also gives you a layout of how to set up your website. You now have three main categories (menu pages), three sub-categories (drop down menus), and one category that covers all three areas (your blog). (Don’t worry about setting up categories and menus for now though, we’ll be covering how to do this later).
Market Research
It’s all very well having a passion for coin collecting, but are there affiliate products available, are people buying products related to coin collecting?
A good way to find out about popular physical products is in Amazon by filtering your search and viewing the “best sellers”. This is a good indicator that people are buying products in your chosen niche.
Another way is to simply do a Google search “your niche”. What sites are ranked on page 1, what products are being advertised? Google Trends is also a good source to find out about things people are searching for and talking about.
Visit forums within your niche, read what products people are talking about and recommending. Facebook is also good for this, there are groups and pages covering every subject under the sun!
Is my Niche too Broad or too Narrow?.
We see a lot of questions from people wondering if their niche is too broad. This is where people become stuck wondering whether to write about all aspects of a topic, or one particular area. For example, you are passionate about health and fitness. There are a HUGE range of topics you can cover, from different types of diets, specific training programs, supplements, mind training etc.
Just because there are a lot of areas that can be covered does not mean you have to cover all of them. Sometimes a person just needs help with direction and focus when they ask this question.
Creating a mind map is a great way to put direction to your ideas. This is how most people’s minds work naturally.
If you were to tell us the subject you want to cover, then we can break it down for you. Even if we know nothing about your subject, we can see an organized direction you could take it.
Need help finding or fine tuning your niche? Leave a comment or question below and we will be happy to give you some ideas. You can also reach out to us here.
Here you can find a step by step checklist for setting up your wordpress website.