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By Eric V. Van Der Hope
Copyright (c) 2008 NicheSourcing.com

Before we go much further, it’s important to consider exactly why niche marketing is such a great approach to doing business. A number of old adages apply here. Stick to what you know is the most significant and the most direct. When you do something you know, whether it’s playing a particular sport, studying a particular subject, practicing a particular profession, or, yes, running a particular business, you are much better off when whatever you’re doing is a reflection of something you are genuinely interested in.

So you’re thinking . . . aren’t my chances of making money online gone or simply not worth it? Aren’t there tons of people making money selling “make money online” products?

Sure there are – and the competition in the market is thunderous!!

However, there has always been and will always be another type of market to concentrate on . . . yep, the Niche Market!

Right now if you haven’t been holded up in a cave for a year or so, the term niche marketing has hit online websites like there is no tomorrow. Everywhere you turn it seems niche this, niche that!

But if you are a bit more aware of what’s behind all the ‘talk’ and ‘fluff’, you will have noticed that niche marketing has been around a long, long time!!

Just look at all the libraries and bookstores in the world – those are all niches – are they not!?

So your choice to get into niche marketing is wise for many, many reasons – the main reason is you’ll make profits in just about anything you choose and package properly.

Oh yeah – the financial benefits are insurmountable . . . !

Ask almost any successful person about their career choice and they’ll probably tell you that they are doing exactly what they dreamed of doing for much of their life, or, at the very least, if they didn’t have that much foresight growing up, they are at least doing the only think they can imagine wanting to do for the rest of their life.

Job satisfaction, or, perhaps more accurately, career satisfaction, is a key component to personal success. That doesn’t just mean financial success, of course, because perhaps you want desperately to be a teacher. Most teachers aren’t well paid but that doesn’t mean to say all teachers are destined to be frustrated with their professional lives. Quite the contrary.

Combining your talents, hobbies, interests, and passions, and incorporating them into your profession; this is a very powerful step towards becoming a happy and whole human being.

It may sound a little weird, but at the end of the day, personal happiness makes a difference to a life in so many ways.

This course will present you with just about all the information you need to set up a successful business targeting a market niche related, one way or another, to you; what you know or do best. However, before we begin to look at what you need to do to set up a successful business, it’s as well to consider a few points about what not to do.

So if you are not totally familiar with what a niche is, here ya’ go – it’s a small but potentially profitable market segments for which it is possible to design and provide a form of custom-made products or specialized services. It’s also an activity that is ideally suited to a particular person, group of people, or personality type.

So what does it generally take to become a successful niche marketer?

Believe it or not, as I mentioned earlier, the notion of niche marketing is fairly old but it is gaining new significance in the world thanks largely to the development of the internet.

Think for a moment about what the internet is allowing the modern world to do and you can immediately begin to see the connection to niche marketing.

Actually, you don’t have to run a business online to be a successful niche marketer; however – these days, running a business online is not only easy, it tends to be pretty cost-effective as well.

The internet opens up the whole world!

People in Europe can connect instantly with people in the United States, Australia, Africa, Asia. Virtually anywhere, with anyone, so long as there is an internet connection and some kind of console, such as a computer or even a mobile cell phone or PDA system that allows an internet hook-up.

By bringing people together like this, the internet effectively tears down or negates the geographical borders between individuals around the world.

Someone interested in Star Wars and who lives in Asia can connect in seconds to someone else with the same interests virtually anywhere in the world!

Everyone is unique, with their own unique set of needs and interests, but the internet, in particular, makes specialist knowledge more accessible to individuals in general.

It also draws together existing niche markets, people with special interests, and provides businesses with a means of reaching significant numbers without having to spread their business out over a large area.

At the end of the day, niche marketing is about targeting. The internet makes the target market larger, more accessible, but the principles are the same whether you are developing a niche market business online or offline.

So why should you consider niche marketing . . . ?

In most cases, you will not be competing with big businesses. Large corporations have extremely large overheads that include advertisement budgets that are extremely high and obviously other costs and the like. Therefore, they need to make huge profits for them to just ‘break even’.

So they can’t afford to make only, let’s say $1,500 to $10,000 or more per month from a niche. It simply wouldn’t be good business in their eyes . . . they would actually be loosing money!

So this is where we come into the picture . . . !

We can pick and choose the market and easily accept making $1,500 to $10,000 per month. Who are we paying, what’s the overhead!? Let’s just say it’s much simpler! As a small business and entrepreneur these profits are very good!

Getting into niche marketing is extremely beneficial in many ways. If you can find niches that people are very passionate about, advertising becomes extremely easy because in the eyes of someone who is purchasing from you – already wants the product!

It’s also easy to find potential customers in niche markets.

What do I mean . . . ?

You usually can find people who have a passion or love of something or if they are expert at something, they tend to read the same things and usually hangout in the same places!

We’ll get into more detail in later lessons and cover this more extensively.

So you are probably thinking right now, what kind of niche markets are there . . . what should I be looking at . . . ?

Just to give you an idea that basically you have the whole world to pick something from, the ideas that you could think of are actually more than you can imagine!

It’s all about properly researching your niche!

Here are examples of niches (some of them may or may not seem odd to you – only goes to prove you can find a niche in just about anything! 🙂

1. This is one of my niches . . . Reef Keeping! (yep – that’s marine fish, corals, etc.). This is an extremely popular niche, filled with passionate hobbyists that spend extremely large amounts of money . . . ! I know – I’m a reef keeping hobbyist myself!! 🙂

Check out my site for yourself here . . . http://www.reefkeepingbasics.com

2. Video games

3. Teaching musicians how to play piano by ear.

4. Powerball

5. Scuba diving

6. Wire sculpture

7. Truck accessories

Take this course seriously, it will provide you with the necessary foundation to get started by helping you set out in the right direction, not just to set up a successful business but to establish a business that will bring you great personal and professional satisfaction in addition to great personal and material wealth!

Above all, keep in mind that, as an entrepreneur, your chief obligation is to be true to and to balance both the creative and the practical aspects of who you are.

Wherever the road takes you, enjoy the journey from here on in; good luck!

In the next lesson, I’ll discuss the 5 most important things you MUST know prior to deciding on targeting a specific niche market. This will ultimately be the deciding factor if you are going to make a profit or not! If you aren’t going to profit from it – there’s no point wasting your time and energy on something that will not work from the start!

That’s all for now – I look forward to talking with you further in the next part of my informative yet valuable 6-Part Mini-Niche eCourse.

Read Lesson #2 by clicking here

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If you missed the Mini-Niche Introduction, you can click here to read it! 🙂
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