The Ultimate Guide to Niche selection
What is “Niche” ?
A Niche is a specialized market segment for a particular product or service. A Niche that you choose should be high in demand with less competition. It should provide a solution to the target audience.
How to Select a Niche?
To ensure your startup isn’t fighting an uphill battle from the start, you’ll want to take the time to choose a profitable niche that doesn’t face much competition. This guide to selecting a niche will walk you through the steps of finding and validating your business idea to ensure your product or service has enough demand to support its existence. By following this guide, you’ll be on your way to starting the business of your dreams in no time! But before that, you need to ask a few questions yourself.
What are your strengths?
The first step in niche selection is assessing your own strengths. Ask yourself what you do best, and spend some time brainstorming answers. What are your career goals? What skills do you have that will make those goals easier to achieve? Where are your passions? It’s important to realize that starting a business does not mean becoming an expert overnight; instead, focus on one niche where you can gain experience and establish credibility. Once you have a handle on what makes you unique, then it’s time to start thinking about how others view your niche.
Consider: Is there a clear need for someone with your specific expertise? What questions would you expect from customers within your niche? These are just some of many things to consider when deciding whether or not you’ve selected a viable niche. You don’t want to be marketing something people don’t need or care about! Thus, people’s research becomes very crucial while deciding your niche.
Competitor research
Before you can even start to select a niche, you need to do some basic competitor research. Make sure that your industry has room for more competitors and that your niche selection isn’t going to over saturate your industry. Competitor research is also important because it allows you to get an idea of how much work will be required in order for you to find success, as well as what kind of level playing field your competition has when it comes down to building out their business and acquiring customers. Also, make sure that there are enough niches within your industry that haven’t been saturated yet with competitors (most industries have specific niches where no competition exists). You’ll want to avoid being me too, especially when starting up a new business.
If people are already buying from other businesses offering similar products or services, then those niche segments aren’t available for you to dominate just yet. On top of that, once a niche does open up—perhaps due to market saturation—you don’t want to be competing against people who have sunk costs into developing their brand name recognition or customer base; otherwise, you’ll never know if you really had more luck than them. All-in-all, having several different niches on which to focus helps reduce risks by allowing you to fail without jeopardizing your entire business; doing so makes it easier for you to not only focus on fewer but stronger strategies moving forward.
What topics do people search for?
Find out what people are searching for. Basically, take some of the most popular posts and match them up with potential keyword search volume via Google’s Keyword Planner tool. This will give you an idea of how many people are searching for that topic on Google each month and if there’s enough volume for you to potentially make money from it. It’s certainly not an exact science though. Some days more people will be searching than others. Some keywords have millions of searches while others might only get just dozens per month. No one knows why exactly but usually it has something to do with news cycles, seasonality, or possibly regional trends. Either way, as long as you’re aware of these things before you start spending time creating content, you’ll save yourself some time in research and learning later down the road once your site starts making money.
Which niche has less competition and more commercial viability?
Determine how you want to position your business, then find out what people are paying for that information. For example, let’s say you want to create an e-commerce store selling handmade scarves and mittens—and that you know how to do it well. It doesn’t matter if there are a million other stores already selling those products online. What matters is finding out what people are willing to pay for your knowledge and expertise in that niche.
Using Google AdWords or another keyword tool like keyword.io or ahrefs, conduct a survey of all searches related to handmade scarves and handmade mittens. See which one has more searches but less competition. The niche with higher traffic volume will likely have more commercial viability because there’s clearly demand for it. If that’s also true when you look at specific product queries like a handmade scarf (versus just scarf), then you’ve got a real winner on your hands—which means lower costs per sale and less customer acquisition costs down the road. Just make sure not to get too specific!
Can you learn more about this niche?
When you’re planning your new business, it’s important to ask yourself, Can I learn more about this niche? This question can also apply if you’re thinking about switching from one niche market to another. If your answer is no, then that could be an indication that you should choose a different niche. It may seem like you know everything there is to know about your niche now, but during the start-up phase, it will be imperative for you and your team to learn as much as possible. You want to do all of your research upfronts so that when issues or questions arise later on, they don’t catch you by surprise.
Some good research skills to have include: Search engine optimization, which allows you to look up pertinent information that people are searching for online. Without proper search engine optimization (SEO), your business simply won’t get found in searches, regardless of how great it is!
Individuality, which allows you to stand out among competitors online—and offline! Finding out what makes your brand unique will help ensure longevity in your niche; after all, uniqueness keeps things interesting and fresh. Plus, when a customer buys something because they feel an emotional connection with a brand (because it stands out), they’ll likely remain loyal customers due to brand loyalty. Customer loyalty means repeat sales, growing profits, and long-term success! All great results you need to strive toward during your startup phase!
Can you create value in this niche that’s unique from others?
The challenge in any niche is finding an angle that’s unique from others in it. What perspective can you bring to bear that others aren’t? What personal experience do you have or skills do you possess that could give your content an edge over others? Is there an area where so much information already exists, but yours will be more digestible or easier for busy people to consume (e.g., audio vs. text)? How about something really off-the-wall that no one else is doing?
Just because other people are creating content in a particular niche doesn’t mean you can’t create value by innovating on what they’re doing. Just keep digging and see if you find anything that stands out as being truly innovative. If not, move on to another niche and continue searching until you do find a spot worth committing yourself to. You might need to go through 50 niches before finding just one worth investing time and energy into—but each niche gives you valuable insight into what kinds of issues and information others want—and don’t want—to know about right now.
When done right, niche selection ensures your chances of success are maximized while simultaneously reducing wasted effort on topics nobody wants at all—which means less work and more potential earnings down the road!
What platforms should you focus on building content on?
It’s important to use your time wisely. To best focus your energy, you should consider which platforms will drive your content and ultimately, give you an edge in that niche or industry. For example, if I were writing about running shoes for runners and athletes, my content would be more geared towards Instagram (or similar) where I could engage with my target audience more easily. Likewise, if I wrote about technology for computer professionals and gamers, then my channel of choice would probably be YouTube. It all depends on who you want to reach out and engage with. What do they use? Where are they spending their time? Try to put yourself in their shoes and build a platform strategy around how THEY consume information.
You can write good content without any video at all, but it’s not going to reach as many people as an engaging video where you’re interacting directly with them instead of trying to promote something or just selling them something (like most ads do). Whether or not you choose one over another really comes down to what makes sense for each specific niche/industry and how YOU choose to market yourself. Just make sure that whatever platform(s) you decide on is relevant and resonates well with your target audience before putting ALL of your efforts into just one place because there’s no better way than reaching everyone if we’re only focused on reaching some people!
Who can you reach out to, who can help you learn about this niche further?
Looking for more information on niche selection? Reach out to others in your industry and ask them what they think. Some common questions you might want to ask include:
1) What niches do you operate in and why?
2) What’s one niche I should avoid getting into?
3) What’s an untapped niche that’s growing quickly?
You can also hire someone with experience choosing niches, but keep in mind that their services will be costly. Be sure you know exactly what you need before you invest money into these consultations. Also, note that hiring experts can lead to difficult conversations if your niche selection ultimately goes south—because it often does. As such, try picking a topic related to your own interests or expertise. If you have unique insight into an under-served market (perhaps based on past work experiences), go with that! If not, consider finding another area of interest so you don’t fall victim to analysis paralysis when making decisions about business direction.
Should you start writing content now, or keep learning first?
Both! While it’s important to have at least some idea of what you want your content to be about, don’t start writing before you’ve done any research or brainstorming. The niche selection process will help you identify potential topics related to your target audience and industry. Learn as much as possible before deciding on one or two topics that can be used in your keyword list. That way, once you get started, the writing process will go smoother and faster—and it won’t matter if these topics are later changed or expanded upon during content creation.
Writing with intention is better than writing without direction, but researching ideas before committing them to paper is also an effective strategy. Be flexible yet proactive; there is no right answer here. You just need a plan for moving forward, whether that means creating five pieces of content for three topics or two pieces for six unique topics (or somewhere in between).
Conclusion
- Start with a niche you know about and that excites you. You’ll have more fun and find it easier to connect with your audience if you’re already passionate about your topic.
- Do some keyword research in Google Keyword Planner, which can help you determine what people are searching for on Google and Bing, which will give you ideas for terms related to your industry.
- Set up accounts on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. The more channels through which you can provide value to customers, the better.
- Join forums and Reddit threads within your industry so you’re always involved in conversations with potential customers. A significant social media presence will get people talking about your business before you even launch—and that only helps its chances of success.
Niche selection is easy if we do our research properly. Once the niche is selected, start building your startup and working on it.
To learn the marketing concepts for your startup click here and if you are a beginner in marketing, click here.
Happy Learning!