What is a Niche and How Do You Find One?

According to Wikipedia, a niche is “a special place within the scheme of things.” Niche marketing is defined as “the process of finding and serving small but potentially profitable market segments and designing custom-made products or services for them.” So, it is all about finding your special place, and the products and services that fit.

Right from the start, you should understand that your goal in discovering a niche is to concentrate all your ideas and thoughts into the most precise, concise, and focused concept possible. Your potential audience is everyone in the world with computer access and an interest in your site’s topic. Your potential information resources are everything known about that topic. So you want to be sure to have enough information to eventually fill hundreds of pages, and you want to narrow your focus enough that you can be perceived as an expert, as “THE place to go” for information, products, and/or services.

I want to add right now that if your only interest is making money online, this is a difficult area to build a website around these days. That niche was “hot” eight years ago. Most successful internet entrepreneurs in that area say they would not attempt breaking into that niche if they were starting out today. There is just too much competition, there are way too many experts already. Breaking into a niche market using keywords like “make money at home” “work at home” “home business” is next to impossible. There are billions of niches out there; find yours.

Focus, focus, focus…

Let us say you are interested in art. You can narrow your focus by choosing an art medium, period in history, particular artist, subject (still life, dogs, clothing, hairstyles, architecture, etc.), events, geographical location, and/or the life and inspiration of one or more artists. Your aim should be to choose as many of these focal points as possible, so that the result is extremely well-defined subject matter.

Then you want to find out how frequently people are searching for this information, what keywords they are entering in the search engines, and how many sites are currently available with that information. Eventually you will come up with your concept, your keywords, and you can begin creating your domain name and meta tags for your…