Define Your Online Niche – How To Find Your Sweet Spot

Making sure you’ve discovered your niche is the key to building an online business that succeeds. A niche, when thoroughly researched and prepared for, is the key to not only great website traffic and a top search engine result, it’s also the key to achieving maximum profits. Therefore, the first step you must consider when beginning any online business is to discover your online niche, otherwise known as your ‘sweet spot’.

Here are a few tips to get you started.

Online Niche Tip 1: Make a list of topics you’re interested in and/or passionate about

Assuming your online business is a roaring success, you’re going to be writing, speaking, and planning your business almost every day of the year. It really helps if you enjoy what you’re working on. It’s also to your advantage if the topic is one you have a certain level of knowledge or expertise in. This exercise will assist you identify your potential business.

Online Niche Tip 2: Evaluate The Demand

Once you’ve made a list of topics you’re interested in and/or passionate about, it’s time to see if there is any demand for that topic. It’s time to do a bit of market research as well as keyword research. Keyword research involves using a few keyword sites like the Google AdWords tool and Wordtracker to accomplish two key things:

Firstly, you want to see if there is a lot of demand for your topic(s) and secondly, you want to see if there is a lot of supply for your chosen topic(s). What you’re looking for are topics with high demand and low supply. Meaning lots of people are looking for your information and very few websites are providing it. Now if you find that absolutely no one is providing any information on your topic then you’ll want to investigate why. It may mean that it isn’t a viable topic.

Each keyword tool operates a little differently but you’ll see numbers that represent the number of people searching for that topic or keyword and the number of sites or pages that are optimized for that keyword. So if you see that 1000 people are searching butternut cookies each day and there are only 20 pages that are optimized for that keyword, it may be time to dig deeper.

Online Niche Tip 3: Research your competition

Using those same keyword tools and a few keyword tools that help you dig deeper into the keywords your competition is using to market and optimize their site, you will spend some time visiting potential competitors to explore what their niche focus is.

For example, you may visit those website pages optimized for butternut cookies and find that only five of them are cookie recipe sites. The others may be gardening sites and have information on the butternut pumpkin or just random blog posts. So, you now know that you really only have five competitors and can position yourself amongst them by perhaps narrowing your niche even further.

It’s possible, for example, to choose to have a website devoted entirely to cookie cutter cookies rather than all cookies, assuming there is high demand and low supply for that topic.

Online Niche Tip 4: What topic seems most profitable?

Finally, analyze your topics based on profitability – which topics have the potential to make the most money for you. For example, a website based on cookie cutter cookies may be great fun for a while but are there many moneymaking opportunities? On the other hand, a website based on a high-end luxury product, like Italian Espresso Makers, may have more income opportunities.

Selecting your online niche is a hugely worthwhile process. It can take a little time to find a topic that meets all of the criteria above however, it is definitely time well spent. A well-researched niche topic or ‘sweet spot’ will more than likely help you achieve all of your online entrepreneur dreams.