Choosing a Niche – Practicality

• Passion
• Practicality
• Profitability

If you haven’t had a chance to read the first post in this series, you can find it here: Choosing Your Niche - Finding Your Passions.

Last time, we looked at ways to identify your passions when choosing a niche market for your online venture.

Just to summarize: Unless you select a niche market that you’re passionate about, or at least very interested in, it’s difficult to build the momentum to make your venture successful. Depending on whether the niche topic interests you, building an online business can be quite enjoyable, or it can be a lot of difficult, tedious work. Picking a topic you’re passionate about will provide a solid foundation for you to build a successful business.

Now, let’s look at the next ”P” of choosing a niche market: Practicality.

Practicality is a hard concept for many internet marketers, because at their core, successful marketers are creative people. Being practical seems to take a bit of the wind out of our sails, because suddenly, there are constraints around what we can reasonably do.

But in order to build a successful online business, you have to exercise a measure of practicality. Your niche topic has to interest not only you, but your potential audience as well.

There are four main aspects of a practical niche:

1. It has a sufficiently large audience. You may be passionate about a certain topic, but does anyone else care about it? I don’t mean this to sound negative – most of us have obscure interests that very few internet users care about. For example, I’m a huge fan of cello rock, but I’d have a hard time developing a successful business around that interest.
2. It has reasonably low competition. The more blogs and websites there are dedicated to a particular niche market, the harder it will be to gain “traction” – that is, to attract enough visitors to build a critical mass of traffic. This isn’t to say that you can’t build a successful business in a highly competitive niche, but things will go much more smoothly if you choose a niche that isn’t being targeted by thousands of other marketers.
3. It offers long term interest. Hot button topics such as celebrity deaths are great for short term traffic, but they don’t provide sustainable interest. After the buzz around a hot button topic has died down, how many people really want to continue reading about it? Successful businesses are built around content that will continue to be relevant for years.
4. There is enough information about the topic to build a wealth of content. Content will drive traffic, build credibility, and keep readers interested in your niche. The more relevant content you provide, the more potential customers you will attract.

Ok, so now we know the facets of a practical niche. So if you’ve already created your list of topics you’re passionate about, get it out and begin examining each potential niche to see if you can use it to build a practical business.

In my next post, we’ll explore the third “P” of choosing a niche: Profitability.

Lee

Twitter: @JJMbuzz

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