Find Your Niche in 10 Minutes: 8 Easy Steps!
You know you have what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur, but there’s just one thing holding you back: finding your niche. We get it. Identifying your niche market can be tricky. After all, we humans have a lot of hobbies and interests. But we’re here to tell you finding your niche doesn’t have to be as complicated as you think.
Whether you’re struggling to start a products or services business or you already have an online business, but you’re no longer feeling it, it might be time to reconsider your niche. Keep reading this article to learn our strategies for turning business ideas into a profitable niche.
What Is A Niche?
A niche is something specific and different from others. While this is the broad usage of niche, the term niche means various things across different industries and fields of study. For example, a business niche is a segmented area of a larger market that organizations can serve. Meanwhile, an ecological niche refers to an organism’s position or function within its environmental conditions while other plants and animals.
While niche has a variety of meanings, in this article, we’re going to stick with the business example. Odds are if you’re looking to find your niche market, you have a business, or you’ve considered starting one.
What Does Find Your Niche Mean?
When we say find your niche, we’re referring to how you identify yourself apart from others. For example, in a business scenario, you as an entrepreneur can differentiate your idea from competitors.
For example, let’s say you have a fantastic chocolate recipe that you’d like to use to start a business. Since there are many chocolates out there, you decide to focus on perfecting one type of chocolate, white chocolate. You pair your white chocolate recipe with a baked good to form a high-quality, unique treat. That unique treat becomes your niche product.
How to Find A Niche
While it’s important to find your niche in life, it isn’t always easy to identify. However, as a business owner, it is important to know your niche. That’s why we’ve come up with 8 steps you can use to get your niche ideas flowing.
1. Identify Your Passions
According to a study by the Pew Research Center, when asked, a combined 54% of Americans said their hobbies and careers make life meaningful. If over half of us take our passions and interests so seriously, it makes sense to identify our passions before we try to solidify a niche.
But, how do we do this? Taking the millions of ideas that interest us and turning them into a few areas of focus can seem daunting. Lucky for you, we’ve written a blog on this exact topic: 6 Steps to Find Your Passion and Make An Impact In the World. In this blog, we clarify how you can find your passions and leverage them to your advantage.
2. Find A Common Theme Among Your Interests
Reddit suggests the ideal number of hobbies for any one person to have is 3. Unfortunately, too many interests and passions lead to a melting pot of concepts with no real direction. This can cause your focus to spread thin. Instead, your goal needs to be finding a common theme among your top interests.
For example, you might like plants and nature. You also might like taking photos and helping others. Maybe you’re supposed to create a coaching program that teaches people the benefits different plants have on your mental and physical health. You include photos of plants you’ve taken in modules of your program. The photos help people understand which plant goes with which benefit.
Struggling to Find Your Niche?
Take the How to Find Your Niche Quiz!
3. Research Your Idea
Now that you know what you might want to niche in, it’s time to research your idea. But before you begin, there are two things you’ll want to ask yourself during the research process:
First, is there a need for my idea?
Determine if there is a need for the idea you have in mind. Essentially, will someone actually spend money to purchase your product or service? One way you can determine this is by sifting through the People Also Ask section of Google.
For example:
- Go to your Google search bar and type something relevant to your theme. Following our plant theme, I typed in, “plants beneficial for health.”
- Then, scroll down to the People Also Ask section of Google
- If there are questions relative to your topic, odds are there is a need for what you are offering.
Topic Relevant to Theme
People Also Ask Section
Second, does my idea already exist?
The next question you’ll want to ask yourself when researching your topic is if it already exists or not. Utilizing the answers on the People Also Ask section of Google can help with this as well. Is there any organization writing about this topic that also does what you’re trying to do? If so, you might need to think about how you can do things a bit differently. If not, it’s safe to move to the next step of niche identification.
4. Assess the Competition
Now that you’ve researched your idea, it’s time to take things one step further by assessing your competition. If there isn’t an organization that does what you do, think about how you will execute your strategy. Maybe there’s a company that is similar but doesn’t do everything you want to. They could still be an indirect competitor.
If an organization does what you’re trying to do, think about how you could do it better. Read their customer reviews and look for pain points. What are customers saying about that company? Where are their strengths and weaknesses? Is there room for your organization to provide better customer service or an enhanced learning experience? Here’s a sample SWOT analysis chart you can utilize to assess your competition:
5. Choose a Niche and Try It Out!
You now have enough information to choose your niche. Try out your niche and see if it works. One simple thing you can do is develop a landing page for your idea and cross-promote it on social media. Even if you don’t get a lot of purchases, that doesn’t mean you don’t have the right niche. You could be targeting the wrong audience, or your content might need adjusting.
If you’re still a bit confused as to how we got to this point, here’s an example of how everything comes together:
Using Our Previous Niche Example:
1. Identify Your Passions
Erica identifies her passions and discovers she likes tending to plants, helping others, and taking photos.
2. Find a Common Theme
Erica decides she can create a learning program that helps people identify holistic plants that can help them in life. She uses her photos in the learning modules of the program.
3. Research Your Ideas
Erica discovers there isn’t anyone else that does this exact thing. She also finds the following search queries on Google:
- How plants can help fight diseases
- Best plants for mental health
- Gardening as a therapy
4. Assess the Competition
Erica finds a company called Blossom that has a plant app where you can identify the different plants you see, but it doesn’t tie that to holistic health. The app is very comprehensive and does a great job identifying plants. The identification software is her weakness, while her learning module is her strength. She decides her approach is unique enough to make her holistic health and plant learning program a niche.
5. Choose A Niche and Try It Out
Erica decides to launch a holistic plant health learning program, complete with coaching calls to help individuals utilize plants in their everyday lives. She utilizes a learning module software like easygenerator to create her program. Then, she creates a single webpage with a link to sign up and purchase the program. She cross-promotes it through a Youtube ad.
6. Identify Customer Problems and Solutions
Now that you’ve tried out your idea for a period of time, it’s time to assess it and make sure it’s the best business model for your passions. Oftentimes people in business do this by looking at how they can help their clients meet a specific set of customer needs.
Use a survey to ask your current customers what their biggest struggles are. Get on social media and ask them what they love most about your products, as well as what they would like to see more of. Identify how you can help them overcome their biggest hurdles. Then tweak your product or service to meet more of their specific needs.
7. Solidify Your Niche Market
You’ve tried out your niche and made adjustments based on customer pain points. Now it’s time to solidify your niche market. To do this, you need to know what customers you’re targeting. Customers will influence your content, marketing, products, and everything else in between.
While your initial temptation might be to broaden your offering to anyone and everyone, that approach isn’t always best. When you target everyone, you end up sending generic messages out to potential target audiences. The result is you end up selling less.
8. Market Your Niche
If you’ve done everything above and you’re still struggling to get customers through the door, it might be time to evaluate the platforms you’re using to market your idea. For example, while social media can be a great asset, a personal website and email list can also serve your target market.
Another way to leverage yourself and your business further is by giving a TEDx talk about your niche. TEDx talks reach thousands of people and are one of the most popular forums for getting your ideas out into the world. A TED Talk coach can guide you through the process.
Other Common Niche Questions:
How do I find a profitable niche?
To find out if your niche is going to be profitable or not, look up market values. Here is a list of the most profitable niches today and in the next coming years. You can also utilize Google trends to see analyze whether or not you’ve picked a niche that is going to reach a large audience. Go to https://trends.google.com/trends/ and just type your niche.
How do I find my niche market?
Take your idea and drill it down to a smaller group of people you will market to. Here is a list of potential niche markets you could try to target and capture your business with:
- Environmentally conscious consumers
- Health and wellness-focused individuals
- Pet owners
- Gamers
- Homeowners
- Remote workers
- People in your local community who love buying local
What to do when you can’t pick a niche?
Focus on the problem you’re trying to solve. Go back to your passions and think about what problem they can solve for people. Identify how you can solve that problem and follow the 8 steps to find your niche.
Picking a Niche That Sticks
It’s easy to get overwhelmed during the niche picking process. But following your passions while solving customer pain points is a massive step in the right direction. From there, look to your earning potential. Potential income is a great way to decide if the niche you’ve created is what you want to continue pursuing. It can tell you if you’re going to keep everything the same, make adjustments, or shift ideas entirely.
Remembering the why behind what you do can also help you pick a niche that sticks. You’re taking your favorite passions and using them to help others and earn an income. Your business process needs to be profitable, enjoyable, and helpful. If your idea enables you to create a business model that covers all of these categories, you’ve found a niche that sticks.
