Starting From Nowhere Part 3 - Finding Your Home Business Niche

What A Home Business Niche Is, and How To Find It

Having decided that you want to start your own home-based business, the next step is to identify your niche. You might have a general idea about the type of work you want to do, but you need to identify your exact niche before you start making a business plan.

The importance of finding your business niche is something you will see mentioned time and again on the Internet but it is not confined just to Internet marketing, it applies equally to any bricks and mortar business; to be successful, a business must fit comfortably into a niche. To find your niche you need to decide on your preferred area of work and find out what market exists for particular products or services associated with your preference.

For example: you might be interested in sport, but that is too wide an area to be a niche so you must narrow your area of interest. You can do this by choosing one particular sport, let's say you are a golfing enthusiast, so your niche is narrowed considerably but golf in general is still much too wide, so you need to look at aspects of golf to locate possible niches.

You might want to teach golf, or write books about golf, or sell things connected with golf on the Internet through your own website. Any of these areas can be further narrowed down but let's assume you want to sell things connected with golf. A possible niche here is selling golf clubs but that is still very wide, it can be narrowed down to bargain priced clubs, or children's golf clubs, or used clubs, or products from one exclusive manufacturer. You could also investigate golfing attire, golf shoes, or golf bags. Another possibility is selling golfing memorabilia or books about golf on eBay. These niches could be further narrowed to relate to one particular famous golfing personality.

Each time you think you have narrowed your niche sufficiently, you should do some research to find out if there is enough of a market for what you would be offering. Depending upon the results of your research, you can then look at refining your niche further or possibly combining two niches. One word of warning: don't try to invent a mixed niche. A niche selling golfing memorabilia and golfing books from the 19th century would make sense (whether it would be profitable is for you to decide), but a niche selling golfing memorabilia and rare motor vehicle parts would not work.

Having multiple streams of income (eg selling golfing memorabilia and sourcing scarce vehicle parts) is fine, but the two must be marketed separately. In the case of our example, you would need to operate a niche website for each niche and many people do exactly that. You've heard the term "niche marketing": well, that's how it's done. To be a niche marketer just means finding a product or service to appeal to a narrow section of society. If the potential market for your niche is very narrow, you expand your business by starting up in other niches, not by trying to make your niche wider. We'll look at this a bit more in the next article in this series.


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