Achieving Success Through Rapid Failure
The Niche (CS 1)
So far, I have talked about my objectives and my online business model. Today, I am going to talk through how I have chosen my niche. My goal here is not to over-complicate this process, and a few of you may be disappointed with how short and straight -forward my approach to this is. On the other side of that, it is possible that you may find this simplified approach refreshing and that it might be an approach that works for you!
Lets gets straight into the nuts and bolts of it..
What I Need from a Niche
There are essentially two things I need in a niche, and I call these “consumer elements“.
1) A niche where there are clear problems to solve, and people are motivated to solve those problems quickly.
2) A niche that has a lot of motivated and interested buyers, who virtually obsess over the chosen topic.
In all honesty, I could find a niche with one or the other of these two elements. If I had no.1, then I would have an excellent “fast buck” niche, where I could make fast money, and have a reasonable income over the long-term. If I had no. 2, the chances are it would take a while longer to establish trust and authority in that market, but the long-term wins would be worth it in the end.
If I have a balance of both these customer elements in my niche, it means I have the opportunity to profit quickly, but also maintain a sustainable business with longevity.
The Big Three
Whenever I have launched a product or been involved in setting up a new venture online, I have always began with, and tried to stick with the Big Three. The big three are massive timeless markets/industries that have huge audiences, and contain both of the “consumer elements” that I talked about above.
Each one of these markets has large sub-niches within them. Here is a list of the Big Three markets, and a couple examples of sub-niches for each of them:
1. Money – Make Money Online, Real Estate, Forex etc
2. Health and Well-Being – Weight loss, Build Muscle, Six-Pack Abs, Skin Care, Cure Anxiety
3. Relationships – Online Dating, How to Get Girls, How to Save Your Relationship, Get Your Ex Back
As a bonus, I’d also throw “personal development” into the mix. Any self-help based content seems to do very well these days as people look to improve their lives and their ability to succeed in life. There are a ton of sub-niches within the self-help space, but I am not confident enough yet in adding a fourth to the “Big Three”.
All of these niches are ever-green (last forever) and have information in them that people have been, and will be buying for years. They have a ton of sub-niches, all of which fulfill our two consumer elements that we discussed at the top of this page.
My approach from here, is to select one of the Big Three and then settle in a sub-niche. I am essentially finding a huge market and audience, and then taking a small slice of it with my web presence. I don’t worry about it being over-competitive, or getting out-played by bigger, more established players.
Of course you could take the opposite approach, and find a very niche market, and look to take a massive part of that market-share. You could also look to focus on hobby niches, where there is huge demand for information. I know several marketers who have grown five-figure-a-month businesses doing this, but its not my personal preference. In my opinion, such an approach takes too long to properly research and develop. I want the fastest results possible.
Niche Research
In order to find my sub-niche, I start by selecting one of the big three, and then listing sub-niches within it that I am interested in or have some experience in. The trick here is not to over-complicate this. If you are really struggling to come up with sub-niches, use the following 3 free tools from Google to help you out:
(All three of these online tools are fairly easy to use, but if you are struggling at all, leave a comment or shoot me a message and I will put together some kind of tutorial on how to use these)
After I have listed the most interesting sub-niches to me, I then go and check that people are making money in them. Its a fairly fast 4-step process (again, keep this simple).
1. Go to Amazon and see if there are any books or magazines on the subject being sold.
2. Type your keywords into Google and Bing to see whether anyone is advertising on these keywords and selling related products on their site.
3. Go to Clickbank, search the marketplace and see if any vendors are selling similar products, memberships etc.
4. Check the top 10 search results for the keywords on Google, and see how the top organic search listings are monetizing in that niche, and take a look at any websites advertising on them.
If you see a good level of business being done on 3 of any of the 4 channels mentioned above, you have got a solid sub-niche.
Once I have identified the commercially viable sub-niches, I choose the one that either has the most potential or interests me the most.
The Next Step
As you can see, this is a fairly simplistic approach to selecting a niche, and thats because I am sticking to niches that are already proven and working. Thousands of business people have been there before me, and that allows me to take a short-cut by using their hard work to my advantage. Niche research and niche selection used to take weeks out of my life, and was the biggest source of my procrastination. I need it to be simple and fast.
I am not going to share with you the exact niche I have decided on for this case study, but I can promise you the above is the exact process I used to select it. Perhaps in about 12 months or so, I may be willing to reveal my niche and even my website, but then I don’t want people just copying word-for-word what I am doing. Its not about the niche you select at all, its about the approach you take, and thats what I am hoping you will realize as we go through this case study together.
Moving forward, I am going to be putting together an initial content strategy (keyword research and the like) and then building the first elements of my web presence ( a squeeze page and initial website). After that, it is all about implementing and tweaking the traffic strategy, and playing around with the sales funnel to yield the best possible conversions. I will be talking about all these items in the up-coming articles.
If you have any questions about how I have chosen my niche, or if you would like to share how you choose your niches, then feel free to leave a comment below. I always try to answer every single one I get.
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