Choosing a Profitable Niche

Choosing a Profitable Niche You Can Succeed In

There’s a certain hesitation people have before starting their online business directly related to picking their niche. You can’t really go any further and build a site, create products or blog about your insight if you don’t have your niche chosen. Let’s discuss choosing a profitable niche right away.

*I’ve written Part 2 of this fascinating and important topic here*

The sheer number of factors to consider when choosing a niche is a daunting task for many new online entrepreneurs. Your main concern right off the bat is profitability, because who wants to go to any effort whatsoever if there’s no return for you?

There are a couple of basic things you need to analyze before finalizing your decision on which niche(s) you’ll be targeting. Nothing you do can guarantee success, but these tasks allow you to mitigate some, if not most of the risk.

First, Stop Worrying About the Competition

One of the biggest non issues people worry about is competition. There are people who will throw up their hands and walk away if anyone else has ever done a topic before. And some who will walk away if a certain number of sites exist (whatever number they’ve made up to depict too much competition).

The reason they are overly concerned with this is because in the past, many guru marketers have spent ample time selling courses teaching people how to target low hanging fruit and avoid saturated niches.

The truth is, most consumers like to learn from and follow many people in a niche they’re interested in. Even you do it! If you’re interested in a topic, like intermittent fasting for instance, you don’t land on one person’s blog and only vow to learn from them and no one else, do you?

No! The fact is, you will look up many people and companies to learn from – you might buy 2-3 or even more books on Amazon to read about it. You’ll go through the results on YouTube and start watching all kinds of related videos to get differing insight and opinions on the topic.

We love to learn from many people for several reasons. First, they have differing teaching styles. Some people are brash, some coddle you – others give advice daily while some release big information less often. Some use text in a blog that you can read, while others publish videos or stream live from their social media pages. There are some who prefer to teach through a podcast, too!

Your opinion and insight doesn’t have to be better than someone else’s ideas. It just has to resonate with that one person who prefers your teaching style over someone else’s. As long as the information you’re providing is viable, don’t be afraid to compete with anyone and everyone.

There are some people who love self help topics who fall all over themselves whenever Tony Robbins or Brendon Burchard speak. And there are those who can’t stand listening to either of them. How boring would it be if there was only one person per topic we had available to us to learn from?

So ease up on your self-doubt, put away your tools that calculate the competition and understand that there is plenty of room for everyone, regardless of your experience, your appearance, your income level or any other measurement you might be using to talk yourself out of making the leap into a niche you’re truly passionate about. I like to think of it as “coopetition,” where all of us are cooperatively competing with one another in a professional way.

Secondly, Use a Drilled Down Versus Broad Approach

So now that you know there’s no such thing as too much competition, your next task is to consider whether you want to take a broad approach to your niche or drill it down a bit. Did you know that choosing a profitable niche would be so interesting?

And when you drill it down, how much is too much? You want to pick the right amount of depth because if you go too narrow, you might whittle your audience down to almost nothing, making it hard for you to profit from your efforts.

Let’s look at how a niche is drilled down. We’ll start with the diet niche.

Diet –> Fasting –> Intermittent Fasting –> 5:2 Diet –> 5:2 Diet for Women –> 5:2 Diet for Women Over 40 –> 5:2 Diet for Vegetarian Women Over 40

This is a typical way to drill down a niche. You can certainly do whatever level of depth you want, but it’s important not to go too detailed because then you’re excluding large demographics from your audience.

Drilling down to fasting excluded other kinds of dieters who don’t want to fast. That’s fine because there are many people who want to learn about this method of losing weight.

Going into the 5:2 fasting method eliminates everyone wanting to do the 16/8 method, the eat stop eat method, and the alternate day fasting method. As soon as you added women into the niche, it excluded all men, too.

So as you can see, the more narrow you get, the more potential customers you’re weeding out. As long as that demographic stays large enough, and you can use common sense to gauge it, you don’t need a statistician to configure numbers for you, it’s good.

Keep in mind your site can start out broad and have drilled down categories in the sidebar where each category drills down even further into individual blog posts covering the most narrow of topics.

So you might have a Best Diets for Weight Loss blog that serves as an umbrella for a huge number of diet plans. In the sidebar, you might have the following categories:

* Keto Diet
* Vegetarian Diet
* Paleo Diet
* 1200 Calorie Diet
* Low Carb Diet
* Fasting Diet
* Mediterranean Diet…and so on

In each category, you can create specific blog posts covering all of the narrow slants under that diet, including a blog post titled: The 5:2 Fasting Diet for Vegetarian Women Over 40.

Make sure that before you choose an approach, you keep in mind that if you have a broad topic, your audience will expect ongoing content that covers a wide variety of subjects.

Your consumer who is interested in learning about diets will be disappointed if they land on your site and see nothing about low carb because you’re too bogged down in writing about fasting, calories and plant based diets.

You have to be able to plan strategically with your content and keep up enough. So if it’s too overwhelming to meet all of their needs, consider narrowing down a bit so that you’re able to deliver content that meets the needs of all of your readers consistently. Allow the process of choosing a profitable niche to be a fun one that will lead to greater things for you as an online entrepreneur.

I’m author, publisher, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and my goal is to connect with you if you have more than just a passing interest in getting started with an online business. I just released Really Simple SEO Tips and Keywords for Beginners and this is an excellent place to begin. Please take a look while it’s still at its introductory pricing.