Choose Your Niche

There's an identity crisis involving the large majority of Internet marketers today. They let a niche choose them. The widespread of this epidemic is in part due to the fact that we somehow believe that all ideas have been taken and used up by their industry-related, and saturated market. But this couldn't be further from the truth.

So, what's the solution? Choose your niche. That's it. We can end this article here. But we won't; We'll elaborate. Starting a new online venture (one that could be tied to an existing business) often starts with a question. That question is "How will my site make me/us money". Whether experienced with Web marketing or not, we all ask it. We can't help it. But from a traditional business owner on the outside looking in, it seems strange. The reason is that a website (with its associated niche) in itself could only be a platform for generating income, and nothing more.

Unless products and/or services are being exchanged (or have the potential to be exchanged), your site will not make you any money {If offline business has taught us something, it's this [swapping 'site' with 'location/establishment'}. From that perspective, we need to look at what we can offer when choosing a niche (to really be in control of our choice, or rather, to choose it with a motivational outlook). The alternative, and what we'd like to hopefully sway you away from, is picking a topic that's fairly untapped for this reason alone. But to clarify, since most niches have already been inhabited, a more accurate statement would be to select a subset of a particular niche that has high demand and low supply.

This is where it gets confusing. Wouldn't it be better to go with a niche that's easier to rank for at the search engines, has less competition in general, and allows for quick returns on investment (whether they be financial, or of time and effort)? Ideally, yes. But this theory is incomplete. It's missing the most important aspect of building a brand around a niche, and that's purpose.

Being enticed by an untapped niche (made aware of by use of a niche selection tool, or because some apparent guru Internet marketer mentioned "It'll be profitable for you") could be dangerous. Instead of building upon a strong foundation, you'll be sinking in quicksand from the very beginning.

The argument is that a person (or group of individuals) can build several websites, each based around one of these goldmine niches (or niche subsets), and as long as revenues (which in this business model tend to be acquired by selling lackluster goods or by receiving pay-per-clicks on ads placed in prominent areas of your site), exceed costs (i.e. hosting, site design, and other miscellaneous factors)... you turn a profit. Although it adds up as the process is multiplied, it doesn't work nearly as well as it used to (at least from the sole standpoint of making money).

Search engines, thankfully, tend to favor brands these days, which makes it much more difficult to get their attention; In other words, throwing a few longtail keywords onto a Web page and as meta tags doesn't have the same effect anymore. Plus, managing thousands, hundreds, or even dozens of websites could be a daunting task - and not as fruitful as you'd imagine it would be. What's more, you wouldn't be providing any significant value to a single person.

In this day and age, we're seeing that a website is much like your home or brick-and-mortar business. It's a hub that needs to be nurtured, and this takes time and plenty of meticulous work. Choosing a niche that matches your skills along with products and/or services that offer definite value is vital, therefore, to your business. Your first choice is the best one. And there will never be a better time than right now to move forward in this direction.