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How To Find Your Perfect Niche In 5 Steps

The biggest struggle that a beginner in online marketing face is choosing a niche. But what is a niche and how can you find a niche that fits you and the market?

What is a niche?

Before we dive deep into finding a niche we have to understand what a niche is and why it is important to choose a niche.

A niche is a distinct segmented of a market, in other words, an audience.

 

That sounds really complicated but is in reality not. Let’s have a look at the market fitness.

Inside the market fitness, there are many different niches, like weightlifting, bodyweight training, running, swimming, etc.

Sometimes even the niches itself can have sub-niches like bodybuilding, cross-fit, etc. inside the weightlifting niche.

Each of these niches has their own audience and their own topics.

Why should you choose a niche?

As I already mentioned, each niche has its own audience and topics. That is important to know so you can really address the interests of an audience. The more specific your blog is the higher will be the engagement rate on your blog.

If you have a blog about running and somebody comes to your blog as a runner he will be really interested in your articles. And if you can solve a problem he has (e.g. finding new running shoes) he will be happy to click on your affiliate link.

The more you know about your audience and their problems/interests the easier it will be to create new content and build a follower base.

Now that we know what a niche is and why we need to choose a niche, let’s have a look at how to find the perfect niche for you!

The 5 steps of finding a niche

Step 1: Brainstorming

At first, we have to collect a lot of different ideas. At this point, it is important to know that there aren’t good or bad ideas.

I say that because I often see people only thinking about very good ideas and they come up with nothing. That’s why you should write down every idea you have.

Take a piece of paper and answer yourself these questions:

• What am I interested in?
• About what topics I love to read books or read blogs?
• What are the topics I can talk about for hours?
• What would I do if I had one million dollars in my bank account? (That sounds really stupid but it can really help finding hobbies you are passionate about)

Don’t judge yourself. Just write down every single idea. As I said, there are no good and bad ideas in the beginning.

Step 2: Get specific

Usually, you have now a lot of generic ideas like sports or technology (like in my case). Now you have to get more specific for every idea. Here you can ask yourself the following questions:

• What makes this topic interesting to you?
• How far are you an expert in this niche?
• Who is usually asking you for advice on this topic?
• How old are they?

For example, you wrote down technology as a topic but what does this mean? Let’s assume you are very good at assembling computers. You build together a lot of computers for your friends and family. Usually, you help people who need a lot of power but don’t have a lot of budgets.

That can be gamer for example or spare time cutters. And usually, they are in the age between 25 and 35.

That has to be made with every idea you had.

Step 3: Eliminate ideas

While thinking more about all your ideas you usually find a lot of ideas that are not that good. In this step, you can eliminate all the “bad” ideas you had.

Step 4: Chose your niche

At this step, you should have a list of different niches that you are interested in and you could start a business with.

This step can be one of the hardest of all. Now you have to choose one topic you want to start with. That can be really tough because these are all topics you are very interested in.

However, the great thing is that every idea you have now will allow you to work more with your interest. You’ll find people that are also interested in your interests and you’ll connect with new people.

And the best part of all: You’ll be paid for it. You’ll be paid for talking about one of your favorite hobbies.

And that’s how you do work you love. I think work is in this context the wrong word because it doesn’t feel like work. And that’s the most amazing part about starting a blog!

 

Step 5: Start

Now that you have chosen your niche you only have to start. It is more important to start imperfect than to never start perfectly.

Maybe you aren’t an expert in your niche. However, investing time and energy in your niche makes you one. Don’t believe that you can only start as an expert.

Every expert started once as a beginner.

Maybe your blog doesn’t look as perfect as you would love to. Maybe your articles as good as you thought. Maybe you’ll make some mistakes. That’s no problem! 

Creating a profitable blog is a process. On your way, you’ll learn more and more and someday you’ll make a living from your blog. It will not happen overnight.

Put in the work and be patient. No one was able to run a marathon in 2 weeks.

Your next steps will be:

1. Register for a domain and web hosting (start here)
2. Install WordPress
3. Write your first 5 articles and launch your blog
4. Start building different traffic sources

As I said it is important to start! Start within the next 72 hours because if you don’t start within the next 3 days you’ll start never.

Conclusion

There isn’t the one perfect blog topic. There is only one perfect blog topic for you!

Maybe you have to change your niche a little bit by the time. But that’s normal and no problem at all.

That’s all part of the process. You start as a beginner and work your way up to an expert. Don’t let yourself encourage by the mistakes you make. Mistakes are the foundation of success.

You’ll never find a successful person who hasn’t made any mistake at all.

However, the most important thing you need is fun. If you have fun working in your niche it will be much easier to create a successful business.

Now I want to hear more from you!

Have you already found a niche you are interested in? And how have you found your niche? Let me know by leaving a comment below!

Free Traffic vs. Paid Traffic

The most important aspect of every business is traffic. Without traffic, you can have the best product in the world but you’ll make no money.

As soon as you start looking out for traffic you have a decision to make: free traffic or paid traffic?

In this article, I’ll have a look at the advantages and disadvantages of paid and free traffic sources. However, here it is important to mention that the most important aspect of traffic is quality.

Free traffic

Examples of free traffic sources are for example SEO or social media (see here the 5 best free traffic sources).

Advantages

Free Traffic

The biggest advantage of free traffic is of course that it is free. If you don’t count the number of hours you have to work for it, free traffic can have a very high return on invest (ROI).

Let’s say you pay $50 per year for hosting and you make $500 the first year on that website. That means you have an ROI of 1,000%! That’s amazing compared to the ROI of the stock market which is between 5-7%.

No Limit

As you are not paying for the traffic it doesn’t matter if you get 100 visitors or 1,000 visitors. There is no ad spend limit that can stop you from getting more traffic.

Disadvantages

That looks great, doesn’t it? But of course, free traffic also has its disadvantages.

Takes time to build

The biggest problem with free traffic sources is that it takes a lot of time to build these traffic sources. In SEO it can take 3-6 months before you get your first clicks!

That’s a lot of time compared to paid traffic where you can get the first traffic within minutes.

Even if you focus on other sources like forum commenting. As you need time to start engaging with the forum members you can’t get traffic right away.

Hard to scale / control

As the control of free traffic sources is usually in the hand of other companies (Google, Facebook) it is hard to control and scale the traffic. You can’t raise your traffic by 50% if you want to have more.

In addition, it is hard to forecast the traffic in the future. You can only keep building your ranking/social media page and hope that next month you’ll have more traffic but there is no guarantee.

Paid traffic

There are many different paid traffic sources. The biggest paid traffic sources are Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, and Bing Ads.

Advantages

Fast

One of the greatest benefits of paid traffic is that it is really fast. You can submit an ad and get the first traffic within the next minutes.

That makes it easy to test landing pages or sales pages and get a winner really quickly. Also, you can easily see whether a product works for this market or if it doesn’t.

Controllable

If you have a running PPC campaign you always know how much clicks you’ll get and how much you pay for every click. If you don’t get banned you’ll get this amount of clicks every day as long as you pay for it.

That really makes it easy to control your outcome and your income.

Scalable

If you have found a profitable PPC campaign you can easily scale that campaign. Let’s say you have a campaign where you invest $100 per month and you get $200 out the next month.

If you would invest $1,000 the next month you would earn $2,000. If you would invest $10,000 you would earn $20,000 etc.

Disadvantages

Need the knowledge to be profitable

In order to build a profitable campaign, you need to be very skilled. You need to know exactly for which keywords you want to pay and have a deeper knowledge of your market and your audience.

Especially if you work in markets with a higher competition you really need to know what you are doing to make the right choices.

I’m sure if you start a PPC campaign as a beginner you would lose money at first. However, if you keep improving and growing it will be possible for you to build a successful online marketing campaign.

Can be very complex

Should you pay for every impression or every click? What does remarketing mean? How can I see the conversions?

That are usually the questions from beginners when they come to paid traffic. I think that before you invest any money in traffic you should at first learn more about the traffic sources.

Here I can recommend the books of Perry Marshall. If you want to learn more about Google Ads I can recommend the Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords. If you want to learn more about Facebook Ads I can recommend the Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising.

So how should you start?

It is always a good idea to work on more than one traffic source. If your traffic is only coming from one traffic source you are very dependent and your business could crash very fast.

Also, I would mix up free traffic sources and paid traffic sources. The more traffic you can get the more money you can earn!

So for example, you can start with building SEO traffic and add a Google AdWords campaign at the same moment. That way, you already have the first traffic with AdWords and you can build trust and authority by creating content at the same time.

If you are able to convert your traffic into buyers you can start scaling your PPC campaign if you want to.

Conclusion

As you can see the best way is to combine paid and free traffic sources. However, each of these traffic sources have ad- and disadvantages and you as an online entrepreneur have to decide whether you want to work on this traffic source or not.

Now I want to hear more from you! What do you think about that? Would you add any ad- or disadvantages?