How To Find Your Niche?

1). Why A Niche Store?

Niche store is always much better than general store. If you operate a general store, you need to compete with sites like Wal-Mart, Amazon & Ebay, and it's very unlikely that you can get out without being badly hurt. 

The challenge is finding an area where the audience is underserved that interests you so much personally that you are inspired to build a business around it. Build the products / services around the audiences, meet their needs, solve their problems and serve them better. And a niche store is an efficient way of helping the potential customers. Why?

• There's less competition in niches, the more specific & narrow your niches are, the more quickly will you attract your potential customers.

• People who are interested and passionate about the niche, usually tend to know other people who share the same interests. If you serve them well, they will tell their friends, word-of-mouth marketing is extremely cost-effective.

• If you work on a niche that you like, you are learning and improving each day, you will enjoy the process and that's the lifestyle that most of us dream about. 

To find potentially profitable small business niches, it is usually necessary to dig four to five levels deep. 

2). How To Identify The Best Niche?

a). Start your niche business from one of the Four Ps: Passion, People, Problem & Products

• Passion: You can develop your business by serving people who have certain hobbies and are passionate about certain industry, issues, etc. People are always willing to spend thousands of dollars on things they truly enjoy and they are proud of that.

• People: Think about what type of people that you want to serve and you want to invest your time and efforts in. Who are the people that you would most like to help?

• Problem: Start from you own experience & your life. What problems do you encounter that you wish a better service could be provided? What will you do to make other people's life more convenient and easier?

• Products: If you already have products, information or services, you can develop the existing products / services further, to add more features, functions, to suit a wider audience or serve the customers better, etc.

b). Analyse the needs of the audiences.

Once you decide you will develop your business around what purpose, it's time to analyse the needs of the audiences. What are the problems and difficulties that people are encountering now? What are their needs and demands? 

c). Measure the market and calculate potential earnings.

Do sufficient researches about the current market needs, product costs, estimate the advertising fees, predict the potential sales amount. Before investing any real money, get the clear idea about what it costs and whether it worth your efforts and time or not.

d). Develop marketing strategies. 

Once you are confident that the selected niche has broad enough audiences and you are able to make decent profits out of it, plan carefully about how you are going to make your products / services be well-known to others. Which platform will you use for advertising? How much is your advertisement budget? What type of ads will you use? Think of the market strategies before getting the products ready to sale.

A broader audience with casual interest may not generate more profit than the smaller audience who is more interested and involved in the products / services.