What is a niche? Why should a beginner know and care about your own?
You should have, in your basic research, many times ran into the word or term niche. Generally a niche refers to your content, site context, your target audience, and where online you intend to earn an online income.
There are 2 parts of the definition of niche that are relevant to us here:
- a place or position suitable or appropriate for a person or thing: this is regarding your customers, this, in our context is finding a place online that is suitable or appropriate to your customers. This means having the content that they are looking for and have found, probably through a search engine.
- a distinct segment of a market: the main word here is distinct. This is where your content is important, if you search online for something (even just information) for your particular pet, you could look up pets. There are many problems as you probably know with this:
- If you search pets, you get sites for all pets, if you have an aquarium, do you want or need to know about cats or dogs? Probably just not go to those generic “pet” sites. If you have a dog, you will not go to a cat site. If you have a large breed dog you will probably search for large breed dogs and not just dogs. How many dog treats are you likely going to buy from a site about birds?
If you want to compete against all the others online line say selling dog treats, you won’t get many sales conversions. If your site is about large breed dogs, you may sell more than a generic dog site. The goal is to specialize as much as you can and in effect eliminate a lot of your competition. There are many earn online websites, too many for us here to compete against. we here specialize in helping beginners learn to earn. We try not to have 5000 word posts that you will never completely read. As a beginner the more you know the better, in certain ways, as much as learning coding or programming would be good, it should not be you priority, learn the basics and start to earn an online income, then expand your knowledge and experience as you continue.
Your niche is your own small piece of a market that you specialize in, you want to be a subject matter expert in this one small are, you need to be know as an online authority for information regarding your chosen niche.
Back to pen and paper (or notepad), how do you find your own niche? You need to start with a general area of research based on your intended content. Why the pen and paper, to take notes. Start with one keyword that describes your intended content, and write down any interesting words you find in titles and descriptions of those results. We even list other domain names that may be sort of in our intended direction, collecting ideas. Visit some of those search result sites and get more ideas about what they offer, what they have for content, and what you want to do differently. You are not looking to outright copy anything just looking at ideas, and even write down stuff you find that you want to avoid in your own content and design. Also, note that some of the top sites should already be specialized, so see which specialized areas of your subject are currently getting higher search results.
There are many search engine tools that will list for you recent common words or phrases people have searched for, if you don’t see your are there, that may be good, not much current competition. Use a search engine and query such as most common searches this week or month, if you see a related patter, write that down.
Back your own niche, your goal is to find what already exists and what there may be little to no competition in, based on your sites intent. Start thinking like a potential customer, search as you would if you were looking for information on what your content is. Again, write down any ideas, if there are 100s of results for a particular search string,, then you will be competing with many other more established sites. Maybe look at slight redirection of your specialty, the ideal goal would be to find keywords or phrases that people are looking for, in your area of expertise, with low search results.
Why do you need to know and care about this stuff? Who would you rather come to your site, someone who is looking for some information, sees a product or service for sale, then price shops other sites? Or someone looking for you specific information and may buy from you because there are not many other places that offer your specialty. If your content and presentation are good, but you don’t get buying customers, then you may want to re-think your strategies. You can easily have the same products as many other sites, but, if you have specific knowledge and information and are a subject matter expert, then your visitors will spend more time on your site, and hopefully make that purchase from you. How many kitchen appliances have you purchased from an online pet store? If this is your goal, searching kitchen will get you a bunch of renovation sites, kitchen being a really large market, but, kitchen appliances , still a large market, but a step smaller. Your goal in establishing your own niche is to do the same, narrow things down, but, go much further.
If you can offer expertise, subject matter knowledge and be authoritative on your specific products, then the advertising and even search results become much more relevant and will help you learn to earn!
Lastly, lets go back to your pen and paper, now you have ideas about what you want to do, what others are doing, more knowledge of your competition, more ideas on what you do not want to do. Start highlighting or re-writing good and bad points or ideas. At the end you should have a much better idea on how to establish your website, get better SEO results, and importantly, get more buying customers$
