How to Turn Your Niche Upside Down

By Bruce Hoag

In this article, I want to show you how to create a niche that is unique in a competitive market. It doesn't matter how many other people are in that niche. If you can figure this one out, you'll have most of the market share.

If you plan to start a business, then you have to decide who your prospects will be. But you can't expect to sell to everyone, even if everyone needs what you have. That's because those prospects will assume that they have have different needs than other people who use a similar product.

So that means that you have to help them to know if what you have is right for them. That's all a niche is.

There are a couple of different categories of niches: Stagnant niches and saturated niches.

Stagnant niches consist of products and services that don't seem to change much.

Offline, this is true of utility companies. They all supply electricity, gas, and water. That's all they'll every do, and probably the only variation you'll ever see will be in the pricing structure.

Online, a good example would be the diet industry. Think back five years and ask yourself how many of the diet plans then are still popular today.

Saturated niches consist of products and services that everyone is selling. In Relationship niche, there are no end of dating sites, advice about marriage, divorce, separation, getting your girlfriend or boyfriend back, how to raise your teenagers, and so on.

In the Money-making niche, there are still people who are trying to sell you on the idea that you can make a lot quickly, easily, or both. Some sites promote gambling, others the financial markets (which you might assume amounted to the same thing), information products, affiliate programs - the list goes on.

Of the two, would you choose to have an online business in the stagnant category or the saturated one.

Most people would pick the first one. But if they did, they'd be looking in the wrong place.

That's because you want your niche to be where people are already spending money.

But, you don't want to compete with them head-on. It takes a lot of marketing clout to do that successfully.

Just think about Google, for example. Where would you start if you wanted to build a search engine to compete with it? That's the question I put to the senior engineer for Bing when I found myself sitting next to him a plane flying from Europe to the US.

His reply was, "That's a very good question." I knew that.

The way to create a niche that is unique to you in a competitive market is turn the industry upside down.

To do that, you need to know what most people do.

You see the typical approach is to make yourself different from everyone else. And so the tendency is to study the competition to see what they're doing, and then look for a way to do something a little bit different.

But what if you look at what they all did, and then figured out a way to make the whole business model better?

If you did that - if you were able to find a way to get better results for the customer than your competitors, you could transform the industry.

That would make you the expert to the exclusion of everyone else.

By the way, you might want to read some other articles on how to get started or make your business grow.

Or, if you would like to learn more about how to have your own online information business, then download my free eBook: Create an Online Information Business

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bruce_Hoag