The origin of the word, Niche, is architectural. Niches were hollows set into brickwork which were used primarily for the placement of small art works or statues in the way we might use a display cabinet these days. A secondary, but obviously related meaning was that of a crevice or cleft in a rock face. Both meanings imply a small hollow space. The word has developed other meanings over the years. With regard to areas of interest, it implies
a rather specialist pursuit with a relatively small following. Many high streets throughout the country will have the odd shop which panders to a particular niche; – a knitting shop, a hobby shop, outlets for stamp or coin collectors, all of which most people would categorise as niche interests.
It must be very difficult to keep businesses like those mentioned above even ticking over, let alone making the owner a good living. The internet has changed all that. Now businesses built within a small niche which, in a high street situation would have an available customer base of a few hundred people (if that), can now reach out to huge numbers of potential buyers. There may be only a few hundred interested people in any one town but, through internet marketing, we can reach people in almost every town in the world. Those hundreds of people become millions within the global context.
Since the advent of online business any specific area of interest has become known as a niche, regardless of how big or small the potential marketplace. You have only to put the name of a particular niche into a search engine to see how many websites there are on the internet dealing with that issue. I have just entered “knitting” into a search engine and come up with the first page of 41,200,000 websites on that topic. Awesome!
So, it is initially rather daunting if you wish to set up a business to sell to that enormous market: how do you cope with such a huge amount of competition? The first thing to say is that the very existence of such a large number of websites is a sure indication that there are many, many customers out there. The process to reel in those customers is a very easy one to describe but, as you can imagine, not necessarily straight-forward to achieve, – unless you are going about things in the right way, of course.
The outline of the process is:
- Create or find a quality product or service which will appeal to your niche
- Create or have created a website to present it
- Get people to visit the website; – the more visitors you can draw to your site the more sales you are likely to make.
That all seems quite simple doesn’t it? It is quite clear that the third of the three points is the most crucial. Just as the owner of a high street shop will put an interesting display in the window to draw people in for a closer look, so you will need to apply the various techniques of internet marketing to bring in visitors to your website. Once there, you must engage with them by presenting an attractive website which will encourage them to spend time browsing the information and/or offers on your site. Drawing traffic to your site is crucial.
There is not the time or space to deal with the extensive issue of generating traffic in detail in this article. However, as with much of online selling, research is the key. Research your niche; research your potential customer base; research the best ways to present your site and research the best ways to promote your particular product or service in a way which will bring potential customers to your marketplace.
Find your niche; – find your product; – find your customers; – find the best way to communicate with those customers and you have a business. Enjoy your marketing.