What ever online business direction you want to take, you need to find your online niche market. Starting an online business can be overwhelming to some people, but it becomes a lot easier when focused on one thing at a time.
Know Your Audience
To find your online niche market, look at your audience. What services or products is your audience looking for? What value can you provide them. As an example, are they looking for clothing? Specifically T-shirts? Even more specifically, T-shirts that reference pop culture from the 80s? Whittling down your audience to a smaller and more dedicated audience is a good way to find your niche market. If you’re passionate about that niche, it helps even more because you’ll have an invested interest (not just monetary) into the product. You need to express that passion and your audience will become more loyal to you over your competitors.
Solve a Problem
So staying with the example of t-shirts from 1980’s pop culture, look at your competitors. Observe what they’re doing right, and see what they’re doing wrong. What are some of the most common complaints your competitors are getting and focus on fixing those problems for your business. Are they able to ship to foreign countries? If not, make that a way in setting yourself apart from the competition. If your competitor is losing a lot of business because they don’t ship to Canada, then make sure you do. Stand out, but make sure the reason you’re standing out is profitable.
Keywords
The next thing you need to do is research the search terms used for this specific market and determine what keywords work best. How is your audience searching? What phrases do they use? What search engine do they use? Make sure you don’t just look at the results for websites, but for image and video results as well.
Once you find specific keywords that work well with your audience and best describe your business, look into URLs utilizing those keywords.
Keeping with the 80s t-shirts example, 80s-Canadian.com, PopCultureTees.com, 80s-TeesCanada.com, etc. This will help you with search results and general SEO.
Passion
Finally and most importantly, be passionate about your business and the niche you are in. Customers know when you’re phoning it in, they know when an employee or owner is passionate about their product or service and are very knowledgeable about that specific market.
So in the end, narrowing down your audience and being able to solve a specific problem is key to finding your online niche market and being successful.
