If you wish to build a profitable online business you need to choose a niche your interested in plus it has to solve a problem. People are willing to pay good money to find solutions to their problems even if it’s an irrational fear or to fulfill an emotional desire.
Top 7 mistakes when choosing a niche
1. Falling in love with your own product
95% of people who sell their own products created them without first doing the necessary research to see if there was a market for it. They decide on a great idea for a product, then invest lots of time and money only to find out later there was no interest. Instead find a niche that is in high demand.
2. Lack of keyword research
There are free keyword research tools such as the Google keywords research tool that will tell you how many people searched for a specific keyword each month. If your keyword received no searches it wouldn’t make any sense to build a business around this topic as their is no interest in it.
Keywords or keyword phrases that receive hundreds or thousands of searches per month would be worth considering.
3. Insufficient market research
Sometimes you may find keywords that are popular (get many searches per month) but they have little or no commercial value. This may be due to the free information available on the net. For instance, say you have choose the phrase “cooking recipes” because it gets 700 searches each month and you want to sell a cookbook of your favorite recipes. Well it may not sell well because all the recipes can be found for free online.
4. Selecting a product instead of a topic
Many people make the mistake of choosing a product over a topic. It’s much harder to write lots of content about a product than on a specific topic. One way to test this out is to create a long list of sub-topics or questions related to your niche. Use these sub-topics and questions to create lots of content.
5. Choosing a highly competitive niche
You may have heard the saying “go where the money is” however if your niche is too competitive it will be hard to make yourself stand out from the crowd. For example the “make money online” niche is extremely popular (195,000,000 results in Google). If you were to start from scratch is would take years to make a dent in it . It would make better sense to select a non-internet marketing niche. You’ll have less competition and it will be easier faster to make it profitable.
6. Selecting a niche you have little knowledge about
If you know a lot about a topic it’s easier to create lots of content for it. Content marketing (ie creating blog posts, articles, videos, audios, etc) is a great way to drive traffic to your website or and helps you to become recognized as an authority in your niche. It’s possible to select a niche you know little or nothing about however you’ll need to invest lots of time on research for you to become an authority on your topic.
7. Lack of passion
Passion is a strong motivating force. If you’re passionate about your niche it will be much easier to be in it for the long term. As with any business there will be bumps along the road you need to overcome. Your passion will keep you going. 95% of online businesses fail in the first 2-5 years so make sure you find a niche you are passionate about.
If you avoid these top 7 mistakes you’ll choose a niche that has great potential of becoming profitable.
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How to Find a Niche to Build a Profitable Online Business
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I recently launched my site to share my knowledge of IM and niche markets. I am always reading the latest information in this area. There is so much to learn and every day it changes. Passion is a definite must when you are creating content, otherwise it’s just a bunch of words on a page that nobody cares about.