Day 2: Finding Your Niche Market

TIPs#3#

How to find the best niche for you?

Hopefully you've realized that this course is not like most others.

First off, I don't include any fluff. We are going to talk about what you need to know in order to succeed.
Second, I am not going to give you the typical "here are three things you must do over and over again to make $100 per day" junk.There is so much more in this business than simple tactics and tricks.The first and probably the most important thing is to find your niche market.

What is a niche market?

According to Wikipedia:

"A niche market is a focused, targetable portion of a market."By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. You can think of a niche market as a narrowly defined group of potential customers."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_market

That's the "dictionary definition", but what does it means to your business?

Well, it means everything!Your "market" is simply a group of people with common interest to whom you are going to sell your products and services to. For example, golf, health and fitness market.

Which of the following is the ideal niche market?

* The entire population in the world?
* A small group of people that no other company knows about?
* A targeted group of people with a specific need that you can fill?
* People who want to work from home?

The right answer is: A targeted group of people with a specific need that you can fill It is a common mistake made by novice marketers to think that the best market is either everybody or a group of people whom nobody knows anything about.

For example, you might think that opening a virtual store that sells gift items of all sorts would be a great idea. Companies like Amazon and eBay make millions of dollars doing this, so why couldn't you? Or you might think that you need to find some obscure market that nobody else knows about where you can then make millions of dollars by being a pioneer.

Even Wikipedia says the following:

"Why should one bother to establish a niche market? Because of the great advantage of being alone there; other small businesses may not be aware of a particular niche market, and large businesses won't want to bother with it. The trick to capitalizing on a niche market is to find or develop a market niche that has customers who are accessible, that is growing fast enough, and that is not owned by one established vendor already."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_market

(emphasis added)

That is probably the worst business advice that you could receive, and it is on one of the highest visited websites on the Internet! Let's talk about these two situations for a moment:

Situation #1 - The entire world should NOT be your market

First off, unless you have million dollars to spend on advertising that you aren't afraid to lose, or you have access to investors with that kind of money, you will NOT be able to compete with other people in the "whole-world" market.

What are some of these companies?

* Google
* Microsoft
* Yahoo!
* Amazon
* eBay
* Dell

What do you think?

Do you have what it takes to compete with the companies listed above?
Probably not (and neither do I).Instead, you need to find those markets that these larger companies won't even bother with, mainly because an extra measly $400,000 per year wouldn't even pay their CEO that would head the operation!

- PS: How would you like that measly $400,000 market? :)

Situation #2 - Do NOT look for markets that nobody else knows about

Have you ever heard of the laws of "supply and demand"?

Simply stated, the price of a product or service is determined by how many people want it, and how much of it is available. If more people want it, then the price goes up. If there is less of it, the price also goes up.
But there is one underlying principle that you should learn:

You cannot CREATE demand!

You might be thinking "Hey! Microsoft created demand for operating systems. Google and Yahoo created the demand for search engines"!That is possible (although arguable), but the fact remains - you have to spend a TON of money to create demand. Do you have a TON of money to invest on that?

YOUR Ideal Niche Market--

So what is your ideal niche market?

Let me give you some characteristics of the best niche market for you:

1. You already have a lot of knowledge of the market
An "ideal" market will be one that you are already an expert in. While you can succeed in a market by learning it while marketing it, it is very difficult and will slow you down greatly.

2. There is some good competition in the market
If there is no competition then there is most likely no demand (99.99999% of the time). That means you will have a very hard time even getting the attention of those in that market.

3. The market is not too large
If your market includes every North American, or every male, or every golf player, then it is probably too large. You need to make it small enough so that the really big companies will not even bother.Once you have "conquered" that market, you can then expand into others and eventually growing into a multi-million dollar organization.

4. The market is not too small
Make sure that there are enough people in the market to sustain your efforts! If you are marketing to left-handed red-headed women golfers who have problems with using their sand wedge, you are probably thinking too small!

5. You have a PASSION for the market
You must have a passion for the market you are going into. When you show your passion, others that you are marketing to will feel that and will trust you far easier.

How do YOU find your ideal niche market?

Are you ready for some work?
Here is an exercise that will help you to find your niche market.

So I'll begin completing the following steps:

Google Zeitgeist- http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html

To begin with, I check out the hottest search trends at Google Zeitgeist. Since I'm usually targeting the US market, I'll click on "U.S. Zeitgeist," otherwise I'll look at "Zeitgeist Around the World." At this point I am just looking for ideas.