Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Niche Marketing - Finding Your Home Biz Niche

So, you have decided you want to get into this niche marketing. You are all pumped up at the thought of concentrating on just ONE product and promoting the heck out of it. But you're confronted with one very nagging question. How do you find your home business niche? Is it just going to fall out of the sky and hit you on the head? Will it come to you in a dream dressed up in confetti? Will it be revealed to you in a fortune cookie that you got from the local Chinese take out? Unfortunately, finding your home business niche is only going to come from a lot of thinking and researching. Nothing worth your time is going to be easy and finding your home business niche is no exception. And while there is no hard and fast rule for finding your niche, these tips should make the job a lot easier.

The best way to find your home business niche is to sit down with a pen and paper, or at your computer if you have graduated from the stone age, and make a list of your interests. That's right. Your interests. What do you like to do? What hobbies do you have? What do you actually do for a living? What skills do you have? If you could pick anything in the world to do, what would it be? What do you have a lot of knowledge of? The questions you could ask yourself are virtually limitless. It's what you do with the answers that's important.

Many of the things you list as interests or hobbies may not make for very good niches. For example, let's say you like to make little houses out of popsicle sticks. Well, it's quite unlikely that you're going to find a market for that hobby, something we will get into next. But there has got to be something that you do or enjoy that other people enjoy as well. In other words, common areas of interest. Once you find that one area, the next thing you have to do is find out if there is any market for it. This is the hard part unless you know where to look.

Fortunately, this is actually pretty easy once you do know where to look. There are a number of tools on the Internet that you can use to determine how many searches people do each month under a specific topic, say, like Astrology. Why look up the number of searches? Because most people who do their shopping online use search engines. So if your research turns up 500,000 searches in a month for acne cures and you're interested in the subject and think you have a great home cure, you have most likely got yourself a market that can make you a pretty penny provided you create a quality product and market it correctly.

But what if, with all your knowledge of acne cures, you really don't know how to go about finding your way through the maze of starting your business and getting it off the ground?