A niche, within marketing, is the term for a small target market. In other words, it’s your audience. Picking a niche is going to be your first step in marketing online. Without anyone to market to, you can’t make money.
There are very broad niches, and extremely narrow ones. When you’re starting out with a website, you’re going to want to target a fairly narrow niche. For example, “art” is a niche, but it’s not really specific. You don’t want it to be so broad you can’t effectively target anyone, or so narrow you have a hard time coming up with content to continuously write about.
It might be overwhelming trying to come up with niche market ideas at first, but I’m going to break it down for you to try and make the process a bit easier.
Let’s take a look at an example…
Let’s have a look at the “art” category. The fact is, it’s way too broad really in terms of being able to effectively market. If someone were to type “art” into Google, you don’t really know what they’re thinking or why they are trying to Google “art”. More than likely they’re not close to being ready to buy anything with a key phrase that vague. The key is to narrow a niche down further so you can have an easier time targeting a specific market.
There’s a lot that falls under the range of “art” – painting, drawing, photography, graphic design, printmaking, sculpting, etc, etc! Those are better. You could create a website focusing on one of these subjects. However, even within each of those sub-niches of “art” is an additional sub-niche!
Let’s break down the “photography” niche –
- photography styles/techniques
- dark room photography
- digitial photography
- photography help/tutorials
- wildlife and nature photography
- underwater photography
You could even create a more targeted niche site around simply, “digital photography”, if you wanted to. Or, you could break THAT down even more. You could create a website where the primary focused was reviewing and talking about digital cameras!
It is up to you, but it depends what your goal is. Do you want to create a small site focusing on digital cameras, or transform your site into a huge authority site, covering a range of topics across photography?
Remember, if there’s a market for it, it’s a niche.
If you’re stuck thinking of ideas for niches, try going to http://www.dmoz.org. It’s really helpful for coming up with thousands of niche market ideas! If you want even more in depth information on niches, watch this great video that breaks down understanding exactly what a niche is, and how to go about choosing a niche for yourself!
You can choose any niche you want!
It helps to pick a niche you are interested in, because that is what will lead to your ultimate success online. Just make sure there’s a buyers market for your niche.
When building a long term successful website, you’re going to have to write about it a lot. Therefore it’s going to need to be something you know a lot about, or at the very least something you would enjoy continuously learning and researching about.
You can make any niche profitable!
When affiliate marketing, many people think they have to go into the “profitable” niches or they won’t make any morey. But the truth is any niche can be profitable if you are able to effectively market your products and develop relationships with your customers.
More than likely you won’t be able to effectively communicate and sell to your audience if you have no interest in the subject matter. There are so many thousands of untapped keywords out there, you can find profitable ones within almost any niche!
If you like what you do, you’ll be more likely to stick with it. It’s hard for most people to write convincingly about something they aren’t interested in themselves. And in affiliate marketing, you need to get people to trust you so they’ll buy from you.
Every niche has an audience, and they want you to provide useful information to them!
Without a niche, you have no target audience to share your ideas!
If you’re looking to build a successful business with niche marketing, I suggest checking out Wealthy Affiliate University. They provide all the training and tools you need to start putting together your own website, and you can try it out for free too.
—->You can check out my review here!
If you have any further questions or anything to add, feel free to comment down below!
-Wendy
I havent signed up ye. but I have been doing a ton of research. I liked your article. I’m an aspiring chef/ foodie extremely passionate about cooking and food. would that be a niche? I just dont get how my site would make money from a food site. Would I have to sell product through the site or can it make money another way… kinda confused.. thanks for your time
Yeah it’s a niche but still a little broad, I’d narrow it down to something like a type of cooking/food, style of cooking, age range, etc. As for how you’d make money it really depends on how you go about it, but there’s lots of options. You don’t necessarily have to sell directly through your site, you could sell through affiliate marketing and you could do it with literally anything related to your niche. There are lots of things people spend money on with cooking.. appliances, equipment, food,… you can work things like that in your site with reviews, etc and make moeny that way. Once you had a good grasp of how it worked and started making money, you could also create your own product (like a cookbook or something) and sell that as well.