Navigate Your Way to Success: Finding Your Perfect Niche Market

When you’re thinking about starting an online business, whether it’s consulting, writing a blog or affiliate marketing, one of the first things you’ll notice is experts screaming at you to get started in a niche. And they’re completely right. A few lucky people who are natural born salesman maybe don’t need a niche market. But for the most of us, if we want to make money online, we have to find a niche that suits us. In this article I will explain:

• What a marketing niche is
• Why is it is important for your online business to have a niche
• How you can find yours
• How you can fit your niche in with your particular online business (affiliate marketing, copywriting, consulting etc)
• And finally a couple examples of successful niches

What is a Marketing Niche?

Simply put, a niche, or marketing niche is a specific part of a larger market. It focuses on one topic where people have a certain need for advice, a solution to a problem, knowledge or just plain entertainment. Then you also have a micro niche, which is a subset of a niche.

For instance, you’re thinking about writing a travel blog. But travel is a very big topic, so you narrow it down to a blog about traveling in Europe. While this is indeed a part of the overall travel market, this is still a very broad subject. So you narrow it down again to traveling through Belgium.  But this may be still too broad a subject. So you change it to a blog about visiting churches in Belgium. Now you have a niche. And when you narrow it down again to a blog about churches in the city of Bruges you have a micro niche.

I’ll give you another example. Say you want to make money as an affiliate marketer in the dating world.  There’s always lots of money to be made in the dating and relationship advice market. But the competition is so vast you either have to be very good at what you do to stand out. Or you focus on a certain part of the dating market. You target divorced women 45 and older who want to start dating again. Now you have a niche. You can narrow it down to divorced women 45 and older who want to start dating again in the city of New York. Now you’re targeting a micro niche.

Why is important for your online business to have a niche

Focus your efforts! Choose a Marketing Niche! I was hammered with this advice when I began my business. And now a few years farther down the road I’m hammering you with the same advice.

A company like Amazon doesn’t have to focus on one certain niche. They sell everything for anyone. And probably have separate marketing/copywriting teams for each section of their website. You don’t.  You may start out alone or with a partner. But you don’t have the time and money to reach everyone in the business you’re working in. Which means, if you don’t choose a niche you’re spreading yourself thin and can’t offer the quality your clients deserve.

My own experience as a Freelance Online Marketing Consultant

When I first started out as an online marketer I would get any consulting job that got into my path; working for an Odoo programmer, techno producer and a taxi company. I basically was all over the place. While I did learn some valuable skills during that period I couldn’t deliver the focus needed. Now I only do business with companies which:

• Are at least 2 years old
• Have between 10 and a maximum of 500 employees
• Work in markets where I at least have an interest in or are knowledgeable about, such as software, music, graphic design (and a small number of other subjects).

For instance I do have some coding skills and have tested different kinds of software at my old company. So when I’m dealing with a software company as a potential client I already have a pretty good picture about their pitfalls. How I can solve their problems and needs. So they in turn will see me as a specialist. This means I can charge a higher rate and have a higher chance of repeat business.

One of my main niches is the solar energy market in the Netherlands. And specifically, doing recruitment marketing for small to midsized solar energy companies. I don’t work for any other type of company.

Saying no to a niche

In another example I was offered a consulting gig at a fashion design agency, specifically a women’s fashion agency. While I enjoy the sight of a stylish clad woman, I haven’t got the foggiest idea how to market such a company. It would take an enormous investment in both time and effort on my part to be any help to them. And I don’t even have any interest whatsoever in this industry. So I turned it down.

In short, focusing on a niche makes you a specialist and you will also have more fun. What’s the point setting up your own business if you have to deal with the same boring crap you did at your old job?

Choosing the right niche will mean less competition and more money

Another very important reason to have a niche is that you will have less competition and make more money. In affiliate marketing the most sought after niches are Health and Fitness, Dating and Lifestyle advice and How to make Money and Financial advice. Those are evergreen niches, meaning that there will always be a demand for those. But if you start setting up a Fitness business without focusing on a certain subject or target audience you’ll soon find out the competition is murder.  Just type in ‘fitness tips’ in YouTube and see the numerous results of fitness channel after fitness channel. All of whom have already created a load of content and following.

There are however still many ways to stand out in the Health and Fitness market. Fitness Tips for people with an injury is a niche. Or Fitness for mountain climbers between seasons , that can be a great niche. And if you think your niche is too small, don’t worry. If you use English as your language, the whole world is basically your audience. And if you start out with too narrow a niche, you can always widen it later.

So to summarize: what are the benefits of working in a niche?

• Less competition
• You’ll be seen as specialist
• More income
• Repeat sales
• More focus on your part, which means you can grow your business faster
• More referrals
• And very important: you’ll have more fun doing what you do

And this is true for any venture you’ll start. Be it copywriting or affiliate marketing: niche, niche and more niche!

How can you find your niche?

This is actually the easiest part, but some people find it incredibly hard to find a niche. Just start out in an area where you’re passionate about or have an interest in. It can be anything. Do you like writing and history? Start a blog about the Civil War. You’re great at Social Media and an avid gymrat? Sell your services to various gyms.  

But if you’re stuck I’ve got a couple of exercises you can do to find the niche that suits you best.

The first exercise:

• Take a pen and a legal pad, reserve about an hour of free time for yourself and close yourself off from any distractions. Turn off your phone, tv, computer etc.
• Write down every skill you have. Try to think really hard about everything you’ve learned in your life. It can vary from such obvious skills as coding or copywriting. But don’t forget ‘soft’ skills you’ve picked up. Maybe you’re great at customer service or you’ve learned how to keep a staff meeting at work short and to the point. Those are skills you can use. So write them down! 
• Write down everything you like to do. Again, this may be anything you can think of. Hiking, cooking, or even just watching TV. If it’s something you like or love to do, write it down.
• Write down any problems, needs or desires you heard/read people complaining about. Doesn’t matter how big or trivial, you might use it.
• And finally connect the skill, the thing you like to do and problem that match each other the best. And voila! You have your niche!

For instance, a fellow entrepreneur started a business giving out interior design tips to to young male ex pats living and working in Dubai. While he himself lived in Mongolia. This is an excellent niche.

He had the following thought process for finding this niche: I have a good eye for interior design, I like giving out advice to people about this topic. And I also hear a lot of stories of young men in their 20’s and 30’s who move to Dubai (or another country in the Arab Emirates), who don’t have the time or inclination to fix up their apartment.

The second exercise:

Go to Amazon.com and click on ‘books’. Then click on a topic in the left bar which interests you. For instance ‘history’.  Narrow it down, in this case ‘military history’. Narrow it down again, click on ‘eighteenth century’. You now have a niche: Military History of the 18^th century.

You can do these with any topic: click on ‘Law’->  ‘Legal Education’ -> ‘Test Preparation’. And you’ve got yourself another niche. I only advise you to choose topics on which you’ve at least got a little bit of interest. If they’re not interesting to you, then they aren’t a good niche for you.

And finally the third exercise:

For this exercise you need a partner. Choose someone who is open-minded or curious about your ambition and who’s also good at asking the right questions. This person will interview you. Let your partner ask you about your skills and passions and let him write this down.  Then ask him (or her) what your best niche is in his opinion. You’d be surprised how well some of your friends can be at assessing what you’re really good at. The only caveat: make sure it’s the type of person who salutes your ambition. I’ve gotten much well-meaning but totally useless advice from friends and family over the years. In this case you need advice from someone who gets which way you want to go. 

With these exercises you should find at least two or three good ideas for a niche. The trick is not to make it too hard for yourself or to overthink it. Don’t try to search endlessly for the perfect niche. If you’ve got a couple of good ideas, pick one and start doing the work! You will get better and better with the topic you’ve chosen. And in a years’ time you will look back and be amazed and proud as a peacock at the progress you’ve made.

And stop thinking in advance that you won’t have a couple of good ideas hidden away in your head. Ok, if you’re 20 years old, maybe you still need to develop the skills and mindset to make it as an online entrepreneur. But at age 30 or 40 even working in the crummiest jobs you’ve accumulated enough knowledge to make it. I have interviewed dozens of people over the years about this type of subject. And in almost all cases I know within one or two hours what kind of hidden qualities and interests someone possesses. 

How you can fit your niche in with your particular online business

All right, now you know what you want to do and in which market segment. The question is how?

Sometimes the answer is blatantly obvious: you’re an experienced copywriter with an intrinsic interest in dating advice. So you start working as a freelance copywriter, mainly taking on assignments in the lifestyle and dating advice market. Later down the road you setup your own blog on this subject.

And in other instances you have to be a little creative and recognize the opportunities the internet gives you. For instance, you’re an online marketing consultant. And there are a multitude of small businesses with an online presence. Precisely because they’re a small business they haven’t got the time and knowhow to setup their website and social media as well as they should. That’s where you come in. Your first instinct would be to look for small businesses left and right. The best way however is to focus on one certain type.  Look up restaurants in your immediate area which don’t have a ‘Google My Business’ page.  Creating one is a fairly simple job. But with this kind of low hanging fruit you can contact these restaurants and offer to do this for them. And of course any other much needed online marketing advice. Voila, you’ve got yourself a couple of customers in a specific niche.

Instead of restaurants you can try dentists, hairdressers, and furniture stores etc. You get the idea.

Affiliate Marketing offers endless possibilites to choose a good topic

In my opinion with affiliate marketing it is even more necessary to work from a niche to make it than as a consultant/freelancer. I will write a set of articles how you can set up an affiliate marketing business later on. But know this: first build your passion and later on fit in the affiliate products which suit your niche. Because affiliate marketing is about promoting someone else’s product. And this is so much easier when you already know so much about the subject.

YouTube is filled to the brim with successful channels who make money from affiliate links. For example, you can start a channel reviewing fishing rods. And in every video you link to fishing products from which you get a commission every time someone clicking this link makes a purchase. The Amazon Associates program is perfect for this, or alternatives like Walmart.

Or you create a YouTube channel where you give out advice on coding. And besides being helpful (very important!) you promote certain courses which teach coding.

Examples of successful niches

By now you should have good idea why choosing the right niche makes your online business venture a whole lot easier and how to choose the right one for you. Almost any topic you can think of can be used to make money. To make it a little bit easier for you I will give you a couple of examples of marketing niches which are quite big at the moment:

• Health and Fitness. One of the Evergreen niches, there will always be a demand for this market segment. Competition is murder however, so try to stand out.
• Dating and relationship advice. Also a lot of demand and competition here. But the quality varies. So if you can offer genuine value the sky’s the limit.
• Making money and Financial advice. Same as above. 
• Sports and Outdoors. Golf especially is great for making money. Golfers are nuts and will buy anything and everything to do with golf. I should know, my father is an avid golfer and his house is stuffed to the rafters with all sorts of golfing equipment collecting dust.
• Software. The commissions on selling software packages and courses are phenomenal, but many in affiliate marketing still don’t realize this.
• Videogames. Lot’s of competition on the one hand, but it is an immense industry. Pick the type of videogame you like, choose a particular target audience (for instance, Gen X Gamers or even older) and use your own Personal Brand to connect with that audience
• Board & Wargames. With the launch of Colonists of Catan game more than 20 years ago, board games became cool again.
• Drone Flying. And everything to do with drones. A relatively new technology/hobby that has really taken off these last couple of years. Again, try to find a particular hook (for instance Drone photography in the outdoors) and a specific target audience.
• Finding Technical Staff for Small to midsized Solar Energy Companies. My own particular niche in the Netherlands.I offer my services as a Recruitment Marketing Consultant, but only  to small to midsized Solar Energy Companies in the Netherlands. Not other industries, not bigger companies and not in other countries. Which makes me somewhat of an Expert, which in turn makes this a great niche.
• Products/services for Petowners. Just like golfers, dog and cat owners can be a bit loopy when it comes to buying products for their pets. This may seem like a saturated market, but if you use your own Personal Brand, you should get a sizable audience of people.

Don’t Overthink it trying to choose the perfect niche and start doing the work already!

While my title says Finding Your Perfect Niche Market, I can highly advise not waiting around for exactly the perfect niche.

Choose a topic that fits with you and where you can see yourself making money while having fun at the same time and start doing the work! 

Most successful business owners, bloggers and entrepreneurs don’t worry too much if their service/product is perfect. But they did start and work their butts off. Finding leads, creating content. Falling on their face every now and then, but rising up, dusting themselves off and improving their skills and their product in the process. And at the end of the road, actually making money.

As Paul Jarvis in his book ‘A Company of One’ put it: ‘if the product is perfect, you’ve started too late’

I see this a lot with newbie Bloggers for instance. They worry that their first blogposts have to be absolutely perfect, miles ahead of the competition, the topic must be something that will attract a big audience of readers but quite unique as well. And what happens? They don’t write a single paragraph.

While if you start writing blog article after blog article, your writing skills will improve. Your first articles may remain largely unread  but slowly and steadily you will find out which topics will resonate with your audience. And you will start seeing more and more visitors to website. If you start doing the work. And twiddling your thumbs waiting to find the perfect niche.

A friend of mine is a good (may I say, PERFECT) example of this. Every time I speak to him he has at least 2 or 3 great business ideas. But he still makes his living as a junior manager working for IKEA Customer Service. Nothing wrong with working in Customer Service, but that guy could have been a millionaire within 3 to 5 years if he exactly tried to execute one of his ideas.

Don’t Choose a Niche that Obviously Won’t Work

And finally, a small piece of advice not to choose a niche or topic that won’t work in a million years. Now I’ve touched upon niches that are too small, too broad or where you have too much competition.

But there are also Niche Topics that simply won’t work, because the target audience isn’t open to it. For instance, helping fat gamers lose weight.

On paper this sounds like a great niche: a specific target audience: fat gamers

with a problem that needs solving: helping them to lose weight, get healthier.

There’s only one problem with this topic. Can you guess?

Your audience isn’t open to this solution in the slightest. Do you honestly know a lot of overweight gamers who’re seriously thinking about improving their health and lifestyle? 

Another example would be:  breakdance lessons for 90 year olds Probably not many people lining up for this topic.

Now the 2 examples above may sound a bit out there, but I know plenty of budding entrepreneurs who are thinking about starting in a niche where there’s no interest in their product or service whatsoever. 

So do your research if your audience is actually open to what you’re selling.