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Know Yourself to Find the Right Niche for Your Online Business - Forget the Net!

December 14, 2007 | Author: Rob | Filed under: Business Advice

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Surprisingly the first thing I’m going to say is that once you finish reading this turn your monitor off and go somewhere where you can think. It’s all too easy to look around the Internet and go from one page to another, registered domain name then realize another niche makes more money and start the whole cycle again.If you are seriously going to make money and have an interesting hobby that could evolve into a business then you need to do something you love and the Internet isn’t going to tell you what that is. Regardless of how many keyword searches you do both long and short it all comes down to you. Only you know what niche works for you. Only you know what you are truly passionate about. When trying to decide what niche to dive into it’s important to have no external influences.

Go somewhere you can be alone and start thinking to yourself if I was a pro blogger and I was going to get paid to write whatever I wanted; what would I write about? What topic could I conceivably come up with new fresh content all the time that would connect with people? What have I done in my life in terms of experience and research that I could share with the public on a large long-term scale? Ask yourself: if I was filthy rich and had all the time and money I ever needed what something I could do that would keep me busy and be fun at the same time?

Once you’ve asked yourself these questions and many other questions similar to them that you can think of write a list. Then ponder the list for awhile until one of them becomes clear. If one does not become clear and you arere incredibly ambitious then maybe you could start two blogs or websites. On the other hand if the two topics are compliments maybe you could combine them?

What’s crazy is the people writing about topics that don’t get searched that much, don’t have the highest paying keywords, don’t really feed any egotistical needs… for the most part these people make decent money on adsense and other legitimate advertising programs. They have a healthy readership and are passionate about what they do. Thousands of visitors who click on nothing will earn you less than dozens to hundreds who are searching for what you’re delivering. Also webmaster related anything is tough to make money on. When is the last time as a webmaster you clicked on adsense? For me maybe 3 years ago!

Also look around the world… most people who make a lot of money provide a service or product that people need. By aiming for the very top of the most competitive markets with the biggest possible money a lot of people lose sight of what’s important and that is providing value. I was in Central America at a friend’s place who was renting a large luxurious villa on golf course near the ocean. I was amazed at how beautiful the home was; 5 bedroom, massive pool, even larger patio with full bar… At one point I asked my friend who owned this place and what they did. Turns out the gent who owned the place made scented toilet paper. Yes that’s right scented toilet paper. When is the last time you heard someone mention scented toilet paper with riches? Sure they probably sell lots of units and therefore do okay on volume but I’m talking this an uber niche market. This guy is passionate about scented toilet paper so he spent the amount of time and effort to develop products and sure enough there are people interested.

In the gold rush everyone went to the same place looking for gold. Only a few found big deposits while others wasted time and their life savings and found nothing… I wonder how their lives would have been different had they stayed home and done something with less potential but a higher success probability? Getting 10% of a pie worth 1000 is a lot better than getting 0.00001% of a pie worth 25,000…We’re on the Internet here so whatever we talk about I guarantee you people are interested. Maybe no one you know in person, maybe no one you know online but if you start creating the content first the search engines then the people will find you and most likely be glad they did. The point of my story about scented toilet paper above is that the more unique and targeted your topic the more likely you will have a competitive advantage as being an early adopter and more than likely people will take interest as there are always people that are “into that sort of thing”. Not only are they into it but they are also searching for it.

Lots of the huge topics such as travel, health care, real estate, disease treatment, web hosting, making money online etc… They already have numerous 600 pound gorillas fighting for market share. Also lots of these sites have been around for years pumping out content, branding and building the user base needed to make huge money. Do you see what’s wrong about entering one of these and thinking you can compete immediately? I’m not saying you can’t compete but I am saying unless you have experience, a game plan and most likely lot of money for startup you don’t have much of a chance of becoming a big player. Lots of these niches are oligopolies. Those of you not familiar with economics, oligopolies are market situations where there are several large players who control most of the market share and then there is whatever number of small tiny firms competing for scraps. Why set yourself up to compete for scraps when you can have the lion’s share of the smaller pie?

To summarize, if you’ve spent a good portion of your life doing anything that is remotely niche… chances are you are already an expert and anyone else looking to get into it (and there are people looking to get into it… would love to hear from you. Chances are they are searching for someone like yourself who has experience and can go into the detail much deeper than anyone else or just as deep as anyone else. I know whenever I search for something I like finding a personal point of view. Too often a generic article or page written four years ago comes to the top. That means the competition isn’t that intense and that no one is really catering to that area.

Finally my best advice is to start small and work your way up. It’s too easy to lose sight of reality and enter a massive / competitive market that you know little about; chances are you’ll fail, become frustrated and give up. If you had started with smaller expectations in a smaller niche that you’re already an expert on you would have succeeded and had a lot of fun doing it. Online businesses of any type for that matter are a lot like relationships; if you want to succeed and be happy - know yourself and just be yourself.

P.S: Think about what you are good at this weekend. Next week I’ll be letting you know where to find the best terms to use once you’ve decided what you want to write about!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 and is filed under Business Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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