Finding Your Niche

If you plan to work online with your own website, then you absolutely must find a niche for yourself to work in. The last thing you should do is try to go head to head with a large company in a large market. That's a sure fire way of failing before you even begin. So it's important that you do your research right. OK, so here's the plan.

Step 1 - Where do your interests lie?
Take a little time to figure out some of the things that you're interested in. You don't have to be an expert in the field. Just write down a few areas of interest. Write down anything that comes to mind, including anything you would like to learn about even if you don't know anything right now. Even if it's a very broad subject, write it down. We'll narrow it down in the next few steps.

Step 2 - Look in the forums.
There is a forum running online right now on whatever it is you just wrote down. There are forums for almost anything you can think of. If you run a search for your subject + forums, you will most likely find a ton of results. Or you can start out in Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/) or Yahoo Groups (http://groups.yahoo.com/). Look around for what people are saying on your subject. Chances are good that some common questions or problems will keep coming up. Maybe a problem that you can solve for them.

Step 3 - Keyword research.
Next do a little research with some of the online research tools that are available. This will give you an idea of what people are searching for online in your subject area. A good keyword tool will give you a long list of keywords, and explain exactly how to interpret the data. Ideally you'll want to find something that's getting a good number of searches, but not a lot of competition, or at least not good competition. Click here for more about keyword research.

Step 4 - Google search
Run a quick search on Google to see what types of websites come up in your field. Most likely, there will be many. Don't get discouraged. Most of them will not cover your niche exactly. Look for the ones that do. See what their websites and sales pitches are like. There's a good chance that you can emulate their success, and even surpass it by simply servicing the industry better.

By now you should have a good idea about what niche you'll want to get into. All you have to do now is come up with something to sell to your market, and a way to sell it to them. Is it going to be an informational ebook? If so, will you write it yourself or hire a writer from a place like elance? Is it going to be a physical product? If so, then you might need a dropshipper.

But for now, let's concentrate on registering your domain name. Click here to learn more about domain name registration.