What Niche?

What Niche – Stop Right Now!

Stop right now before you go on because this is important. Get this wrong and you will be wasting your time and your money!

What niche to work in is the number one stumbling block of most new business people and budding entrepreneurs in my opinion. Most people have dreamed of having their own business at some time, but just don’t know what business to get into and so they just go into any business that they can get their hands on.

Disaster!

What niche you decide upon will make or break you – so it is incredibly important that you decide upon your niche before you actually start setting up your business in any way and that you decide upon it correctly.

What Niche – Step 1 – Is it profitable?

Decide why you are in business. Now this may seem like a stupid statement, but believe me it isn’t. Most people go into business to make money, but some do not. Some do it because they are already rich, but bored and want to fill in time. Some people go into business as a charitable act. Some people even go into business to lose money as a tax right-off and others even go into business for completely illegal reasons.

Now I am assuming that you will be going into business to make money. This is what you and your shareholders want – a return of investment, so it is important that what niche you decide to be in should make you money.

There would be little point setting up an ice shop at the Antarctic or selling fishing tackle in the Mojave Desert if you want to make money!

So the first step you need to decide upon is to only work in profitable niches. Selling football memorabilia at The Super Bowl would be a good idea or selling “family care” packages to departing Kamikaze pilots would be a great example of a well timed and highly profitable niche!

What niche you choose should revolve around the idea of making money. So basically do not go into niches that have no profit in them.

What Niche – Step 2 – Is It Low Risk?

Sad to say, but statistics branded about these days suggest that about 95% of all new start-ups go out of business within the first 5 years. Maybe they didn’t read this article!

For most of us, we do not have billions of dollars behind us, so we probably do not have the protective cushion of unlimited cash. So while we need to chose a niche that will give us a profit, we also need to choose a niche that is low risk. The chances are that we will make mistakes and big blunders along the way. Most entrepreneurs do! Even well trained professionals sometimes make the stupidest errors! Take for instance the story of one of the early partners of the original Coca-Cola Company selling his shares to the others because he believed it wouldn’t make any money!

We all make mistakes and we will all have bad business days. The economy is always changing and the universe dictates that no man can have it good all the time.

So knowing that it will be a volatile world I would suggest that when you decide what niche you want to work in, you decide to work in one that has low risk.

It makes sense to me not to invest all of my savings in a venture that has not yet been proved. I would recommend only investing small amounts at a time until you have recouped each amount if possible.

What Niche – Step 3 – Do I Like It?

Most of your mentors will say that you should find your passion and build a business around that and I will agree and disagree at the same time.

If your passion fits the above 2 steps (High Profit + Low Risk) then I say fine, but if your passion is “The Mating Habits Of An Amoeba” I would say almost definitely no! Now I haven’t done a great deal of research around that subject, but I can’t imagine it being a million dollar earner!

So if your passion is in a profitable niche and it offers a low risk scenario then I would say yes follow your passion. Here you must be honest with yourself and not talk yourself into believing that your passion will make you money.

We will look at how to decide if your passion has a market in another article.

What niche you decide upon the should offer:

1)High Profitable
2)Low risk
3)Be in alignment with one of your passions.

You may find that none of your passions make money and if you are in business to make money, then you may need to start getting passionate about something new!

What Niche – Step 4 – Am I Good At It

What niche you decide upon here will be dictated to a certain extent by the size of your operation that you intend to put up. If you are going to be a one man band then you almost certainly will need a working knowledge of your product and service and be able to provide it at an excellent level.

However, do not forget that you can out-source or delegate to others so that they who are excellent can do the work while you do other parts of the business that you are good at!

Especially if you are working online, you can actually get others to do ALL of the work!

It will help though if you are good at it, but I would say that this is the least important of the 4 steps as there are many people out there who can help you.

These are my recommended steps to choosing What Niche you will work in. Others may have a different opinion, but these steps come from my own experience in life and they work for me.

I fully encourage you to start you own business and one of the ways of ensuring success is by taking a business into a niche market. This was certainly a major part of my success when I started my niche laser business (Argon Animation) in 2001 – and we are still going strong!

In your niche be the authority, be the best and make people know that you are the one to talk to. It is possible and can easily be done is you carefully choose What niche you will work in.

If you need help coming up with Niches, I have a huge website area devoted to Niche Marketing and they can be found by going to my site which supplies loads of incredible information about Niche Products.

Let me help you find your success and to help you find What Niche!

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