Start an Internet Business - Finding your niche

by Derek Jones

You have searched your memory, as well as those of your family and friends, and have found one or more businesses that you would feel is best suited to your interests, knowledge and talents. The next step is to research down into this shortlist, one at a time, to find the section of the business that presents the smallest competition with a reasonable demand that would support a profitable enterprise. At the same time your research will reveal the needs of the niche market with potential products which may fulfill that need. In order to clarify things, it would be best to state what the term "Niche Market" means. A niche is defined as a "specialized market" or "an area of the market specializing in one type of product or service". In other words it is a narrowly defined group that have the same specialized interests and needs, where the group as a whole will have the following characteristics:

1. Your product or service will fulfill their requirements. 2. You can create an offer that will interest them more than those of your competitors. 3. You can create a method to present your offer to individuals within the group. 4. The group is large enough to produce the volume of business you need. 5. The group is small enough that your competition is likely to overlook it.

With the above in mind, and taking one business at a time, you will now need to decide on the best keyword or keyword phrase that defines the niche, and then use it to research the volume of traffic being searched on that keyword, and also the amount of competition that there is for that particular keyword.

If one of your business interests is "fishing", and in particular "fly fishing". The keyword "fishing" is searched for on Yahoo almost 250,000 times per month and there are 140,000,000 results on Google for the same keyword. A large demand in a very competitive market. The term "fly fishing", without the quotation marks, has a Yahoo search frequency of 75,000 per month, with the same keyword providing 2,750,000 results on Google. This is a good demand but still a little competitive. The term "Fly fishing gear", without the quotation marks is searched about 5,000 times per month with a Google search results of 1,500,000. The demand is now down but the competition remains high, however, if the search is made specific to "Fly fishing gear" - contained within the quotation marks, the results in Google drop dramatically to just under 250,000. The competition is not quite as tough here.

Once you have found a suitable niche it is necessary to dig even deeper into it. Forums are an ideal place to find out about your niche, in particular what your niche market is looking for. Search on Google entering "Your keyword+forum", without the quotation marks. You will be amazed at how many forums there are available online. One will surely help you find what you want. Read the posts and make notes when you find items that may assist you with your business. Find out, and get used to the language of the forum. Check out the posts of the moderators as these will be the specialists within the particular forum. In this manner you can get a feel for the niche, find some of the needs within the niche, as well as answers to some of the problems that you have already come across within it. In this way you can glean enough information to become an expert within this niche, especially if you start posting to them and interacting with the other members of the forum.

The analysis above is a very basic one and intended to show the technique of finding the niche. The example shown is very simple, but you will need to improvise on your keywords to drill down to find the gold that you seek. The work needed to start an Internet business can be time consuming, but it is wekll worth the effort.