There are millions of people logging onto the internet every day from around the world searching for the next big thing to make money online, promote their business and product. The question that needs to be asked before you even think about entering the online world of e-commerce and marketing is What is my niche?. To begin, what does the word niche even mean? It relates to a position or area, that is exactly suitable for the person occupying it.



For the purposes of this article, a niche will relate to a particular topic that you are specially suited or interested in, with the goal of turning your interest into a income generating tool. From this interest you may develop a product, a service or information.

Often people see other people earning large amounts of money from their product and immediately jump on board to start selling the same or similar thing. This has resulted now with the internet being flooded with too much of the same. Take some of the auction websites for example. If you do a search for a computer item such as USB sticks or LCD monitors, or even an mp3 player you will end up with thousands of the same thing. In a highly competitive area it is very difficult to make any impact on the market without spending tremendous amounts of cash on advertising and even then it is hard to guarantee any real success.

The key to making any money online is to find your niche first. This has to be something that you are: 1) Interested in and 2) Have knowledge in this area that

other people do not. It also has to be an area which is untapped and is awaiting someone like you to launch in and make the most of the opportunity. If you can enter a market segment early and provide people with real value then you will find that it is much easier to develop a business that will last much longer than your competitors who try to jump onto the band wagon once they see what you are doing.

Countless people have made their fortune by identifying an area where a small amount of people were interested in, yet there was nothing to meet their needs. The more specific your niche, the more likely you are to succeed. Why is this?

Because you will have much less competition for search engines, and your audience will be specifically looking for you and your product. Your keyword advertising can be very specific, so you know if someone is visiting your site, then most likely they are interested in you and your product/service.

I am assuming here that you have decided you actually want to start your own online business, congratulations, but if you are still searching, then you can go through this process to decide if internet marketing is for you. The more knowledge you have, the more likely you are to make informed decisions, which will result in a better outcome.

So how do you actually work out what your niche is when you are starting up your online business? First of all, identify what area of life you are interested in and think other people would also be interested in. Do a search in Google and see what results you are presented with. This is often a good quick indicator if an area has already been covered. Have a look at the results and see if you could do a better job that would provide value to people. If there are more than 1,000,000 search results from your keywords then there is usually already a lot of content available. If you are presented with too much information then perhaps you need to look at making the topic more specific or choose another niche area that could work better.

There are several ways to perform market research on your potential product for a small amount of money. Firstly you can setup a small website proposing your product. You can advertise the website for a couple of weeks and monitor the visitor trends via many free analytics programs. Ask visitors for their expression of interest and collect their name and email address with the intention of contacting them if you proceed to sell the product. Your traffic to the site will depend on many things, but this is a good way to gain some insight into your potential customers without spending a large amount of upfront capital having a product developed and ordering an initial quantity. Even if you do not proceed to sell the product this small amount of money to do some research will be money well spent.

Another option is to write a survey and have people fill this out. This way you can see what people are after and ensure that you develop your product around their needs. At the end of the day, the more information and research you do, the more likely you are to succeed. In conclusion, it is important to remember that there are many different aspects in running a successful business. It is impossible to cover every area of internet marketing / product creation and niche business in one article, so I encourage you to keep researching and try different methods and see what works for you.