How to choose a niche when starting an online business

Everybody seems to be starting something or the other these days. Millions of online businesses spring up every single moment. And you may have read juicy testimonials of online business owners and you feel this is something you should do too but you don’t know which niche to choose.  In this article you will learn how to choose a niche when starting your own online business.

Examine your passion and skills

To begin, you have to make an honest examination of your own interests, your passion. Having a skill also makes a great difference.  You should not choose a niche just because you are “kind of” interested in it. For you to sustain the drive you need to begin a business, it has to be something you will be passionately doing for a long time, according to Forbes, for at least 5 years.

If the work is something you would continue to do even when you are not paid for it, then you definitely go for that niche. If you are knowledgeable in that niche, it’s a plus.

Find out if there’s a market for that niche

It is not enough that you have passion and can work for free in a niche. You want to find out if people need your services, if they would pay for it. If not, your work will not grow into something lucrative.

To research the market for your niche, do keyword research for specific words from your niche.

• If the search volume for the keyword is low, it means there’s a low market for it.
• If the competition is low-medium, you should go with that as this means your new business can have elbow room in it.
• Go for higher bids as this means people are willing to pay more for that service.

Narrow your niche down further

Next, try to narrow down on the niche you have chosen. For example, you have found that “finance” is a popular niche, but you have to go further down the funnel and see if you can find an even narrower spot you can focus on. Maybe cryptocurrency.

To help you focus more, use tools like Redditlist to find subtopics or sub niches that allow you to narrow down.

Luke williams who runs his own niche online store recommends that online forums are places where you can also find conversations that help your brainstorming. You can find people talking about sub niches in Facebook groups and online forums.

In these groups you will find related questions. Note the frequency of these questions and how regularly people are asking them.

This helps you define your own niche. From the broad niche of finance, you may end up thinking of NFTs as your own spot.

Check out your competition

It’s good to see what the competition for your niche is like before going all out. Now, you need to Google some of the keywords from your niche to see what pops up on the first page.

What you find will be categorized into:

• The niche where a lot of business is already going on in. You would want to rethink going into this niche if it’s oversaturated.
• Very few sites are ranking for a niche where others have discovered there’s no real breakthrough.
• Sites are ranking for the niche but you discover they are low quality sites, with low quality content. The competition won’t be hard on you here.

After doing this, you can decide to go all in. But first, you have to test the waters.

Test the waters

Research helps you achieve a lot but you have to dip your feet in the water of this niche to see if it is lucrative in reality.

Use leadpages to test your niche, put it up advertising a free info product.

Next, pull traffic to the landing page to see the degree of interest you gather.

Watch out that you are not just getting traffic, make sure it leads to conversion.

Survey your target audience to ascertain exactly what their interests are so you can focus on that.

Final thoughts

These steps don’t work magic, but they will sure provide the spark you need to get your ideas running. These tips help save your time and resources, allowing you to hit your target.