Choosing a Niche – Finding Your Passions

So if you haven’t started already, now is the time.

Before you ever launch a website or hire a copywriter to create your content, you need to decide what kind of audience you’re going to target. The days of “build it and they will come” are essentially over – your internet marketing venture has to be a balancing act of passion, practicality, and profitability. These are the elements that will sustain you during the early days, and help you build a lucrative online business.

Let’s examine the first of these elements in a little greater depth:

Passion: It may sound obvious, but if you’re not passionate about the products or services you are promoting, you’re  not likely to be very succesful in your online venture. Sure, there are marketers who can promote products in just about any niche market, but for the vast majority of us, there has to be more than a passing interest in the niche.

I’ve learned this from personal experience – I’ve launched websites in more than a few niches that 1) I knew nothing about; and 2) I could care less about… just because I saw them as having high profit potential. Invariably, chasing these niches proved to simply be a waste of time and money.

For example, the weight loss niche is quite lucrative. But since I’m about 6 feet tall and weigh all of 130 pounds, I couldn’t really relate to the target audience. I got bored with it very quickly, so it wasn’t a good choice for me. If I had taken the time to assess my own interest level,  instead of just seeing it as a money maker, I would have saved myself an untold amount of time and effort.

So before you do anything else to build your internet marketing empire, grab a sheet of paper and a pencil (remember those?) and take a half hour to jot down ideas for marketing ventures that will actually be fueled by your passions. It doesn’t matter at this point how ”out there” the ideas may seem - you will begin weeding through all of the possible niches a bit later. The important thing right now is that the ideas excite you.

Again, I can’t stress enough that you dismiss practicality during this stage. The more ideas you can come up with, the better. Don’t toss out a topic just yet because you think it won’t fly. If anyone had told me that I could build a successful business telling people how to blog for money, I would have laughed. But fortunately, I didn’t know any better… and it has turned into a good money maker. Why? Well, there are several reasons, but the foundation comes from the fact that I care about helping people find freedom from the drudgery of a day to day job, and I enjoy writing the posts every day.

Take the time to put together your list today… in the next post, we’ll start looking at the ideas you’ve come up with, and assessing their revenue generating potential.

To Your Success,

Lee

Twitter: @JJMbuzz

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