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. 

General Store vs Niche Store

If you are thinking about diving into the dropshipping world, but wandering between a general store and a niche store, hope this article will help you in your decision making.  

Though there are many dropshipping gurus and specialists on Youtube and other channels teaching about the theory of opening a general store first, testing the products with it then setting up the niche store with the winning products. They may succeed with this method and it pays off their efforts very well. But honestly, after searching in depth among many forums, websites as well as my own experience, I will vote for working on the niche store directly. Here are a few reasons why niche store is the better choice: 

1). Easier to win customer's trust

After attracting potential customers to your site, all you want is having them buy your products, which relies greatly on how well do you convince the visitors that you are a specialist in the product filed they are looking for and your products worth their trust. However, can you imagine what the visitors will think when they browse your site for iphone cases but find the baby pacifiers on the hot-sale section? How likely will they buy the iphone cases? This could be why your ads bring you visitors, but no sales.

2). Easier to market and target the right audiences

We all know the old saying - "You can't please everyone." Same for the business, when you target for every customer, you will not have any customer. 

Most dropshippers will use Facebook ads for marketing their products and brand. And usually a fan page is required before creating the Facebook ads campaign. However, it would be really troublesome to advertise a general store that selling all kinds of products, since you have to create many different fan pages, in order to target and attract the specific customers. And the name of the fan pages may not be the same as the store name, which will confuse the visitors and not being effective in branding.

3). More efficient for blogging 

Blog is an efficient and effective way in supporting and branding the products. It's quite a popular strategy in providing value-added content with blogs for the potential customers and attract them to your site, then get them take out their credit cards. And such method works well with a niche store that sales products in a well-defined field. You can create an educational content, at the end of the post, you can introduce your products to the readers, and let them know that they can actually get it from your store...

4). More effective in increasing SEO ranking in search engine 

Most likely a niche store is named with the same keywords as its domain name, which increases the chances of the store being searched and exposed. Besides, the blogs content of a niche store are more likely to contain the keywords of the store title, which helps to add more links to the store. And the number of the links a page receives is an important factor for Google to determine the page ranking. 

Conclusion

To be a winner in the dropshipping world and be effective with your time and money, start with the niche store. Do necessary researches and home work first, be familiar with the niche industry that you plan to dive into. 

Right direction, comprehensive planning and hard working increase the chance of being successful.