Before you can start building the website for your online business you are going to have to choose a niche, or an interest, that you wouldn’t mind doing research and writing about for years to come. Because that is exactly how to target an audience online – by providing interesting and engaging content that a niche group of people will find useful enough to read and purchase products or services that you recommend and and can earn a living from.
Want to know another amazing thing about the internet that people are slowly starting to realize? Just about everyone who has access to the internet, uses it.
That’s around 2 billion (with a ‘B’) potential customers worldwide.
It’s not that we forgot that people used the internet – we just can’t fathom how many people there actually are in this world. With 2 billion currently using the internet and a potential market of 7.4 billion people worldwide, the time to start an online business is now.
But obviously not all 2 billion people using that internet are using it for the same things.
However, even if you could capture 1% of 1% of that 2 billion people, you’d have access to an audience of 200 thousand people that all have your niche in common. And that’s per day!
See how easy it is to narrow that 2 billion people down to a number that is a little more reasonable and actually possible for your site? And that’s low for a successful blog. Some of the most popular blogs can bring in millions of people to their site per day, using their website as a money making machine.
So how do you choose a successful niche?
The answer is simple – any niche can be successful.
We just went through how little of the actual market you can target and still get a ton of traffic to your website each day. We’ll get to how to turn that traffic into revenue a littler later, but it’s important that you don’t worry about not having enough people in your niche to target.
There are plenty of people to target in just about any niche that you can think of.
Once you are done worrying about choosing the wrong niche, your mind can be free to start thinking about something in your life that you spend a lot of time thinking, talking, writing, or wondering about.
Don’t be afraid to dream big here – you want to pick something that you’re passionate about but also something you feel you can talk about for as long as you want your website to continue being successful.
If nothing obvious pop into your head then start thinking broad first. Some popular areas are:
- Animals
- Automotive
- Babies
- Computers
- Education
- Entertainment
- Health & Fitness
- Home Based Business
- Home Improvement
- Music
- Pets
- Politics
- Religion
- Science
- Self Improvement
- Shopping & Product Review
- Sports & Recreation
- Technology
- Travel
- and many, many more
However, if you stay too broad and create your business around something broad like ‘Travelling’ then your market will be too large and it will be tough to compete in.
In order to choose a successful niche, you must go deeper.
Sub-niches, such as ‘Travelling to Europe”, narrow your audience down even further. Now you can choose specific products and services that people travelling to Europe might be interested in.
“Travelling to Europe” is still a pretty broad interest that can encompass a lot of different things so another sub-niche could be “Backpacking in Europe”. Now this narrows your target audience down even further and still has more things that you could write about in a lifetime included within it.
Other sub-niches of travelling could be:
- How to travel with no money
- Things to bring while travelling
- Ways to start a travel journal
- Travelling for beginners
- Tips for travelling overseas
- and many, many more
By narrowing your niche down to something more specific you will be able to capture an audience a lot easier than if you just started writing about travelling in general.
That’s the amazing thing about the internet. You don’t have to worry about not having enough people to visit your site because you have access to the entire web!
So instead of having to start a traditional brick-and-mortar business in your hometown and hope that enough people will walk through your doors and purchase something, you can open your shop online and anyone can walk through the doors no matter where they are in the world at any time!
Now it’s time to choose your niche.
Don’t think too much about it and don’t worry about choosing the wrong niche. Pick something that you can see yourself enjoying and talking about for the foreseeable future and then try to narrow that niche down to something you can build a business around.
Next, you will be learning how to build a website that will be the foundation of your online business.
