In recent times, the term ‘carve a niche for yourself’ has become popular. It simply means to stand out and be a powerful voice is a position every business aspires to.
Market differentiation is a concept that businesses use to distinguish themselves from their competitors in the vast market. A business niche is a focused area of a large market that you serve.
Every business should consider a niche as concentrating on clearly defined segments helps you survive the competition, cut through the clutter, and get noticed by your target audience.
Not having a niche can sometimes lead to a business spending more money, time and other resources looking for their ideal client in a large pool of buyers.
A niche is smaller and specific. The key point in creating a niche market is to focus on every unique detail until the buyers can help but notice you. Focusing on a specific niche guarantees higher chances of success.
However, finding a niche is not the easiest task, and the road to creating one you are comfortable with is fraught with mistakes.
But you don’t have to make the same mistakes as everyone else if you know the common mistakes to avoid when creating a niche for your business.
1. Creating a Niche Because You Think it is Lucrative
The earning potential of any niche usually is one of the main reasons you can decide to create a niche. However, a niche marketing campaign predicated on how money mostly may fail.
For instance, if you have no interest in fashion, how do you intend to convince people to make money as stylists?
Not that you can’t learn, but it is important to have some basic interest in the niche you intend to create.
This will make it less tiresome for you and also help you connect naturally with your audience.
If you run after a niche because of the money-making potential, you could hurt your chances of succeeding even before you start.
2. Not Connecting Your Unique Niche to Your Business Growth
Because of the advice on the internet, most businesses genuinely think all you have to do is create enough content, post often, create marketing campaigns, and your audience will show up.
This is the wrong advice. When creating a niche, you have to think in terms of growth.
What realistically is my elaborate plan?
What are my long-term and short-term goals?
How will I keep this legitimate business running properly?
If, for instance, you are a blogger, you will need the traffic to find earnest people to help.
Where will it come from? How do you plan to earn with your dedicated website? Affiliate products? Your innovative products?
How long can you realistically write about your specific niche?
Thinking of your website or selected blog as a business can help you find answers to these questions. it is not enough to just build it.
You need to figure out how people will find you so you can provide solutions for people while earning an income.
3. Creating a Niche for an Offline Target Audience
It is easy to assume that you can find all categories of audiences online, but this is not true. Half of the world is still offline. Some audience is more likely to spend time in an industrial workshop than reading a blog post.
So can you still think you can get the attention of offline audiences with online content?
If you create an online niche for offline people, you will be wasting resources trying to create content for people who will not see it.
4. Choosing a Niche About Products Instead of Addressing Problems
An innovative product is NOT a unique niche. And sites that focus on specific products are also not niched sites. To create a successful niche site, the focus should solve unique problems, not products.
A niche that fulfils a market need has a greater chance of success. You may also be tempted to choose a niche that is too specific. If you are considering starting a business around an exclusive product or service, you may soon hit the ceiling in your ability to grow your traffic and revenue.
When you choose your niche, you need to make sure that you can broaden your reach. Before you limit yourself to a particular topic, perform a Google search with your keywords, and see what phrases Google suggests.
Scroll to the bottom of the results page and note the “searches related to” list.
5. Do You Want to Make Money, or Do You Want to Solve Problems?
Should you choose a niche because of passion or profit? It’s one of the most debated issues in niche marketing, yet all successful marketers have one answer: follow your passion.
But passion remains a weighty word and can be slightly misleading.
You don’t have to love or be passionate about a niche for your idea to succeed. What matters the most is choosing a niche you have an interest in and possess some knowledge about.
It should be something that you don’t find boring, as you will be spending plenty of time interacting with this particular niche. Your enthusiasm will help you connect with your audience and grow.
This doesn’t mean you should only work on the niches you are passionate about and ignore other potentially profitable niches.
For instance, if the niche you’re most enthused about doesn’t have many products to promote or if it’s a service that people are skeptical about paying for online, you’ll have some difficulty making money from it even if you create a body-of-knowledge website on that topic.
The goal here is to recognize a niche that harmonizes your interests and also opportunities for financial growth.
But if you have little knowledge of the niche and its target audience’s problems, you may end up creating content that doesn’t communicate any value to your readers.
As a direct result, they cannot make money in that niche.
6. Going for an Over-Saturated Niche
Some niche markets are over-saturated with fierce competition. If you’ve chosen a popular niche, it could be incredibly difficult to become known by your target audience when there are people already doing faced-paced work on the niche in that sector.
Suppose your skill lies within one of these niches.
In that case, you will undoubtedly have to produce professional, information-packed content that solves your target audience’s issues if you want to become well known in the niche by putting in a lot of work.
7. Choosing a Niche Because of Google Search Traffic
The largest traffic source for most niche sites is Google Search. But is it the sole source you should use as a yardstick while choosing a niche? Assuredly no, because the evidence suggests differently.
According to a joint study by Statista and Parse.ly only 31.8% of articles get found through search engines. A niche isn’t totally of no use if the SERPS are too competitive or it doesn’t attract much traffic on its top search queries.
Many successful niche sites that don’t rely on Google Search.
A study by Affiliate Summit shows that many affiliate marketers often use social networks, forums, email lists and many other traffic sources.
Search traffic is important but also tests a niche from a community-building perspective.
See if you can grow an online group, a thriving email list in this niche, or even set up an online forum. Look for examples of other companies and business models and how those companies have established user communities.
Very often, the conversion rate of the traffic originating from your email list or a dedicated Facebook Group is considerably higher than search traffic.
Which remains why it’s unwise to put down a niche just because of its low search volume?
You do not have to know it all too well in your niche.
This is one of the main mistakes that prevent people from taking advantage of profitable niches. Though you need to have an in-depth understanding of a niche to succeed in it, you’ll have more work to do if it is saturated.
Let’s assume that all of the other internet users possess more knowledge about a certain niche than you; there are still millions of people who’re getting online every day for the first time that know nothing about that niche.
Since you know more than them, you are the expert.
For instance, if you’ve only just heard about Content Marketing today and spent a couple of hours learning about it, you still know plenty more about it than someone who until now doesn’t know anything about Content Marketing.
Sure, you couldn’t advise anything to a Content Marketing expert or an intermediate learner. Still, to a person just interacting with the tools or idea for the first time, you have useful knowledge.
Conclusion
It is important to create a niche in your business, which will help you to focus, and to provide a better value proposition to your customers. Once you possess more knowledge on a topic than an average person, you’re an expert for them.
But you need not be the world’s most considerable expert. You can relatively be an expert on a topic if you know more about it than the target audience. So, when creating a niche, do not hinge value on your level of expertise alone.
Avoiding these mistakes will help you approach niche building with a growth mindset. Creating a niche for your business requires hard work and grit. Are you ready to start?
About the Author
Eugen Spivak is a multi-award-winning author, business strategist, and a business coach. Eugen is the founder of the Canadian Institute of International Business, an organization focused on a better way to learn business!
Study With Us!
We offer practical courses in various areas of business. Our instructors have at least 10 years of practical experience in their fields.
