How to Pick a Niche: Every Small Detail You Need to Know

By Danyon T. | Internet Marketing Advice

Lemme guess – you’re just getting into internet marketing and you’re being bombarded with a bunch of mumbo jumbo about somehow creating an online business and then making a bucket fulla’ cash while kicking your feet up in your P.J’s and watching the money pour into your bank account.

So you go on the ol’ Google, do a ton of research on how to start an online business, and you think you’re ready to jump into the world of internet marketing.

And all of a sudden, your rush of endorphins, excitement levels, and eagerness come to a screaming halt as the question ponders you…

What should my business be about? 

“Should I create a business based on dogs? I mean, I really love dogs and the way they’re so loyal even though they don’t need to be!”

“Should I create a business around teaching lacrosse? I really loved lacrosse when I was back in my ol’ high school days; maybe I should crack into that market…”

“Oh, but then that would mean I miss out on my love for food! I’m an excellent cook, and I think I bring something unique to the market!”

It can be such a difficult decision to pick a niche when starting your online business; I’m sure you have a number of passions that you’d like to create a business around. Unfortunately, the process of selecting a niche can be an overwhelming and can actually leave you in a state of analysis paralysis.

Hopefully, by the end of this article, you’ve gotten a little bit more information on how to pick a niche, and you’re one step closer to starting your online business.

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First off – why should You pick a Niche?

There are a few reasons as to why you should niche down when starting an online business, but here are a few of the essential ones:

  1. It gives you a focus point. Having a niche that you’re focusing 100% of your efforts on provides you with a direction to aim for rather than spreading yourself too thin. It helps with your marketing, business model, the type of products/services you should create, the emotional pain and pleasure points of your ideal customer, etc.
  2. It allows you to become an expert in your niche. Becoming an expert is possible because your target customer feels a deeper connection with you and your business. This is because your business is focused SOLELY on their particular pain/pleasure points. This way, if you help your ideal customer to solve their particular problem, they will psychologically relate these positive results back to you, and place you as an authoritative figure in their brain.
  3. You’re not going to be able to pick on the “big dogs.” You don’t have to own the whole market in order to be successful, and I’m sure you don’t have a billion dollar marketing budget to establish branding and all that jazz like these other big corporations do. You don’t have to own the whole market that you enter, just a small piece of it.
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The 2 key elements to choosing a “successful” niche

When picking your niche, there are 2 critical aspects that you have to keep in mind, which are passion and money. In my opinion, you need both to have a “successful” business (my definition of a successful business is a business that you’re passionate about that simultaneously makes you money).

Let’s start with the passion part of the equation.

Passion is crucial when picking a niche, and this is for one reason: you’re gonna be spending a lot of time on your online business. Your online business is going to be one of the biggest sources of stress, headaches, nightmares, and a bunch of other negative stuff that I  can’t really think of ATM.

What’s going to make all of this effort, time, and sweat equity bearable is if you’re building a business around something you’re passionate about.

Take video games for example – if you’ve ever played a video game that you love, you know that literally hours could pass by without you even noticing how much time you’ve spent on it.

As a kid, I could play Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64 for a whole day without getting bored.

Even though there would be a bunch of stress and headaches that came with the game and the hundreds of boss fights that I would lose (and cry over because I was caught in a constant losing streak), I’d still be able to cope with this stress because I loved the game.

picking a niche video game

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On the other hand, try and get me to do spring cleaning for even 30 minutes, and I’d be sobbing away to my mother that my arms and legs hurt from the basketball game the night before (which doesn’t even make sense, because I spent 99% of my time on the bench anyways).

The point that I’m trying to make is that building a business based on your passion will make the workload endurable – so niche down to something you love.

The second critical aspect in choosing a niche is picking something that you can actually make money in.

This part of the equation is a lot easier in my opinion than selecting one that you’re passionate about because you can go online and do some research and within 5 minutes know whether or not your niche is something that you can build a profitable business around.

For example, if you have an overwhelming and insatiable love for board games, go online and do some research about businesses created around board games. Maybe there’s a business that created and marketed their own board game.

Perhaps you could create an affiliate website around board games if such things even exist.

Go on to Amazon, Youtube, Google, Ebay, Facebook – just scope out the niche and see if there’s money being spent in the niche. If there is, then there’s a good chance that you can create a successful business around it.

picking a niche board games

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Oh, and by the way, don’t think that your passion is too exotic or out-of-this-world to make money from.

I remember reading somewhere that there’s this chick who gets paid to fly out to race horse stables and talk to the horses before their races. Apparently, she gives them encouragement or something along those lines and helps them win the races.

If she can get paid to do that, I’m sure you can get paid to create a business around your passion.

Last thoughts on picking a niche

Here are a few last comments I’d like to say about picking a niche for your online business:

  1. Don’t get too startled. I know it can be difficult to make this decision, but don’t let the amount of information that’s on the internet get the better of you. I started an educational gaming Youtube channel that now has over 1,000,000 views and 14,000 subscribers. People watch my free content on my channel, and then some even pay me to teach them personally. If I can do it, you can do it too.
  2. It’s all about the alignment of both passion and money. Pick a niche that you’re passionate about and that also has some proven track history that you can make money from that niche. Do a bit of research, and then…
  3. Go all out with your decision. Pick your niche, and then get stuck into it. Develop your business plan, draw out your ideal customer and their pain/pleasure points, come up with the products/services that you’re going to offer, sketch out the sales funnel; go all out with your decision – don’t half-arse it.

And that’s all that I have to say about picking a niche! I’m sure whatever niche you choose you’ll do fine in. Remember, don’t be too overwhelmed, just pick one that feels right to you and get to work.

Catch ya later ya internet marketing fanatics!

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