Niche Marketing: The Lifeline to Your Online Business – If you have been grinding away for years at the restaurant or real estate business and have gotten caught up in the day-to-day schedule of getting up, going to work, going through the motions, and then coming home only to spend a few hours with your family before you crash and go to sleep, you have likely forgotten about some of the things that make you happy and are of interest to you.

We talked earlier on this site about the importance of finding your passion as an essential element to building a successful online business.  As they say, “If you enjoy what you do you will never have to work a day in your life.”  Being passionate about what you do ensures that you will succeed with an online business.  The other element is choosing a niche for your topic of interest that will be your Unique Selling Proposition and the one thing that attracts a highly targeted market to your product or service.

Choosing a Niche

Starting an online business means re-discovering your passions and interests.  Once you identify what those are it is necessary to drill down a little further to find an area related to your passion that addresses the needs of a highly targeted customer base.  When you identify your passions and interests chances are other people have the same interests and have started a business related to your topic.  This is why it is necessary to drill down and find a niche that makes your business stand out from all of the rest.

For example, if you have a passion for fishing and you are knowledgeable in this area chances are there are some pretty large businesses on the Internet that specialize in fishing.  Fishing is a very broad topic so what you need to do is drill a little deeper into the topic of fishing to find a specialized area of fishing where there is a market looking for a specific topic related to fishing.

For example, if your prospects are typing “fishing” into the search engines you have no idea what they are looking for when it comes to the topic of fishing.  What about fishing?  Are they looking for fishing poles?  Perhaps they are looking for a book on fishing.  Maybe they are looking for good locations for fishing.  You just don’t know.  However, if you drill down into the topic a little further to a subject such as “fly fishing in Seattle Washington” then you have a better idea of what your market is searching for.  Once you research that market further you will get to know their wants and needs and then you can develop a Unique Selling Proposition.

Getting to Know Your Market

Once you have identified your target market there are many resources online that you can use to get to know your market and find out exactly what they are looking for and why.  This takes some time investment but the information you collect will be worth its weight in gold when you go to establish your online business.

You can talk to your market through social networking, distribute surveys, hang out in chat rooms to listen to what people are discussing about your topic, and review other products related to your subject area.  You can also review other websites that are similar to yours to find out what they are offering and how they are offering it.  Try to determine what is missing and then come up with a unique way to offer it.

So in addition to renewing your passions, it is necessary to find something specific that is related to your passion and area of interest. This should be included in your plan for market research and the results should be recorded in your business and marketing plan when you start your online business.   If you are passionate and knowledgeable in your niche this will reflect on your audience and they will be enthusiastic as well.  They will also return to do business with you because the quality tends to be great when you love what you do.