Your Niche Idea

 

Your Niche Idea –coming up with one that works for you

Presented by Charles L Harmon of Good Luck Domains

How many of us have you ever wondered what it would be like to quit that 9 to 5 job and work from home?  Even if you had a job like I did where you had flexible hours the same applies. You’re ultimately spending your most productive hours making money for someone else. Probably most of us have at one time or another thought about this. Of course there are a few people that love their job and wouldn’t give it up no matter what.

Well for those few of you, there is always the option to continue your work while you come up with a niche idea, different from your job. It is best that it is something you are really interested in and could make a name for yourself or your blog should you start a blog or any other type of niche website.

Everyone has something they are good at, know a lot about, or are really interested in and that could be called your niche. For example, if I were picking a niche it could be astronomy or space, online marketing, buying real estate with OPM (“other people’s money) or “no money down”, or personal finance. Now that’s really too much, so I would have to narrow it down to one of those niches, or even further to a sub niche within one of those niches. The other option is to do one first and if successful, or maybe even unsuccessful, then try one of the others.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about niches:

• Niche market, a focused, targetable portion (subset) of a market sector.
• Niche blogging, a blog focused on a niche market (above)

Dictionary.com says: a distinct segment of a market.

 

So what could be your niche? What are you really passionate about or anxious to learn more about?

Maybe you are a good organizer. Working parents are finding it increasingly difficult to spend time at home; let alone organize a party for their child.  Become a children’s party planner. Do some research in your area, the local children’s indoor play areas, parks, leisure centers, and anywhere that you can think of that would hold a party.  You could offer your services; perhaps leave flyers at schools, nurseries or even playgroups.

Taking it a step further you could develop a niche product. You know the niche; know the problems people in the niche have. Do some research and find out how to solve a particular problem(s) the people in the niche have. Maybe you could create a step-by-step guide on how to make time for your child as a working parent.  Depending on whether you want to get more people to your niche blog or are trying to make a profit directly from the product, you could give it away for free or sell the product.

This is a classic example of sticking to what you know. The same is true of Internet or online Marketing, find a niche and stick to it. Develop products and ideas based on your knowledge.  It gives your work greater credibility because you can write with true authority on the subject.

Are you good at writing, reading or giving out advice?  You could become a Writer, Editor or even a Consultant.  Some people with websites and blogs need a lot of articles or content for their site and may not have the time or ability to write it themselves, or if they do, to check them for typing mistakes, spelling, or grammatical errors. This is where you could come in with your niche idea. You can write, edit or give advice on articles, writing books or even blog posts for other people, in addition to writing for your own blog if that interests you.  Clients could even send you their handwritten version or notes and you could copy, type it, and send the finished article back to them.  Check out the Elance website   to see what services people are asking for to see if you can provide it for them.

Supposed you are interested in birds. That is a huge very popular niche, way too broad to do anything with. But you like working with small wood projects. What about specializing in creating custom bird houses for some of the bird enthusiasts? Or you could build a few bird houses and create plans for them and sell the plans to people in the niche.  Talk to a few people in the niche and find out more about birdhouses and write or have someone write an eBook or report on why one needs a birdhouse to attract the type of birds they like.

The ideas you could come up are endless if you take the time to explore the possibilities of doing things you like and feel comfortable with. For example I was a programmer for many years during most of that time I also did research on my own on betting on horses and whether one could really make money doing so. I found out you could if you did the right things. This was mostly before the internet. But when the internet started I created databases with horse information and sold it to horseracing enthusiasts who had computer programs that could use the data I provided.

One more example about myself; back in 2004 I got carried away and bought about 700 domain names. I had read a lot about them and figured they would appreciate in value over the years. Well to make a long story short, I got rid of most of them over the years since then. But about six months ago I decided to save two domains out of a batch I was letting expire and to put up a website on each for myself.

I didn’t have time to work on the sites and about a month later first one of them, then a couple of weeks later the other domain was sold through my register. I had left them still available to buy at my registrar and sure enough two different people bought those just weeks apart. I was unhappy about that, but still made over $500 on each domain name. So that’s another way to make money in a niche. That was the domain name niche, a niche with a whole lot of competition. But it’s possible to buy and sell domains for a profit. It’s an easy business, but takes research, work, and persistence to make consistent money in it. And…  if you have a lot of domain names like I do it takes quite a bit of money doing this.

Suppose Niches are out for you

Let’s say you see the advantages of having a blog or website catering to a specific niche. But for a variety of reasons you decide working with niches is not for you. Is there anything else you could do, even in your spare time that could make you some extra money? Yes there is. I will just touch on one thing that’s relatively easy. You could become a reseller.  You buy in bulk and sell on auction sites such as eBay or Amazon. A search on eBay or Amazon will reveal a lot of products you might be able to buy low and sell high. That’s essentially what stores do. Just make sure that you have the storage space if you’re shipping physical products.

A similar way to profit that essentially the same but not buying bulk, is to use Craig’s List and buy from there and possibly even sell back on that list, or eBay. If you think, no I can’t do that; take a hint I got from a young medical student last summer. He is into bikes, especially racing and mountain bikes. He finds someone selling such a bike for a low or reasonable amount on Craig’s List. Then he either places an ad on Craig’s List or buys it outright first then places his ad right back on that list for more money. He told me of several of his purchases that netted him from $500 to $1000 for each bike. That’s a nice piece of change for doing something you are interested.

Similar to that, back some years ago when eBay had a lot of websites for sale cheap, I bought one for $9.95. It was a site that sold magazine subscriptions. I registered a domain name similar to a website that also sold magazine subscriptions. It just happened to be a domain name I made up just for that site. Right away I started getting a few orders and made back many times what I paid for the site. I developed other interests and put up that site for sale. I quickly sold it for $300. That was a low price, but I had made more than that while I kept it so I thought the people buying it got a great bargain. You could do the same thing, but now sites cost more and it’s harder to get traffic, especially quickly like I did.

 

Once you’ve found a niche

Once you have decided on your niche you will need to do some research.  Do a search on Google to see “what the competition is”.  You’ll need to check out many keywords to see how many web pages are targeting those keywords. There are plenty of free and paid tools to help you do this. Google’s free keyword tool can be a great help in doing your research, whether you use free tools or even paid tools.

Your research needs to be thorough so you don’t go into a niche expecting to make money, but find it won’t after a lot of hard work. Niche research, however, is beyond this short article. Don’t worry about spending more time than you planned in the research phase and deciding on what you want to do because it’s better to take a bit longer and get it right than be too quick and waste your time for maybe many months only to find you picked the wrong niche..

You will almost certainly need to spend some money in order to make money from niche idea that your blog/website will be about. That’s whether you create a free WordPress blog or pay for one, whether WordPress or not. If you don’t write your own articles or cannot spend a lot of time blogging frequently you may need someone to create some of your blog posts and all this costs money. Decide on how much you want to spend in advertising, articles, other content, possible software of plugins, or development of a product. You don’t want to be out of cash before your business gets off the ground.

The bottom line is it’s better to pick a niche you’re interested in and would enjoy the work involved in helping others in that niche. Picking the best niche idea from several you may come up with goes a long way in ultimately having a successful blog or website along with making money from it.