After months of poring over it, you have finally decided to start a business. The only problem is you are having a hard time deciding on a market niche. Listing down all your interests may help to narrow down your options, but it’s moot if you can’t see yourself being passionate about it for years to come.
If you’re in entrepreneur limbo, don’t let choosing the right niche delay you from starting your business. In fact, you can use that as a motivation to start testing ideas and use the data to help you move forward.
Let’s explore effective ways you can find the right niche for you.
Create a top 5 list of your interests and passions
First time entrepreneurs mistake potential profitability with business longevity. What some don’t understand is it just doesn’t make sense to start a business in an industry you don’t care about. Chances of dropping the ball and quitting increases the less passionate you are about what you’re doing.
What you need to do is list down your interests. You can do this by asking yourself what you enjoy doing as a hobby or in your free time. What articles you’re reading or magazines you’re buying, the groups you’re a member of, and so on.
However, don’t overdo it. Create a rating system and give each interest you’ve listed a score. Your shortlist should include your top 5 interests.
Identify gaps in the market for each interest
Here’s where you’ll need to apply a little elbow grease. You’ll have to do market research to understand buyer behaviour and to pinpoint problems you can solve with your service. There are several ways to do this:
- Go through forums – sites like Quora can help you see the concerns and frequent questions people have. See how many of these you can solve through what you’re planning to offer.
- Focus group discussions – for this, you might need a professional FGD moderator to help you get the best answers from your target customers. Prepare a list of questions that touch on industry pain points, and make sure to follow-up on answers that need elaborating. Remember, the more specific the answer, the better.
- Make use of keyword research – you can also look at the most commonly Googled terms to uncover problems that haven’t been given a satisfying solution.
Research your biggest competition
Part of market research is studying the competition. This includes looking at their website and perusing their content, design, and overall theme. You should also look at their social media pages, the number of engagement, the hashtags they’re targeting, and so on.
Prepare to create a torrent of content
Chances are, your competition are already contending with the same popular search terms already. They are doing this by constantly creating content on their website and sharing them incessantly on their social media pages.
But don’t worry about being late in the game, because with the right online strategies, you can still match or even surpass their presence. Just do the same thing they’re doing, except more aggressive.
- Start with creating a website first. The great thing about Internet registration sites is you can immediately create your page after purchasing your domain through a website builder. You don’t have to learn coding or hire a designer at the first phases of your business, you can just drag and drop to customise your page.
- Create social media pages and invest in ads so that you can reach your target market and get significant returns within a 6-month time period.
- Make original and useful content. With Google’s ever changing algorithm, only one thing remains the same: content needs to be relevant. If the content you’re churning out are just spun or plagiarised, you’re not going to get the leverage you need to strengthen your visibility, or worse, get penalised by Google.
You want a business that will remain viable over the years. This doesn’t just happen because an industry is lucrative, it’s also because of the motivation to continue caring about the business. Choose a niche you feel will drive you to innovate for years to come, and you’ll be reaping rewards soon enough.