Wednesday, August 22, 2007

How To Find Hot Niche Markets

Working out what your niche market will be to start your home business is something that can elicit much excitement. This is when you can put all those great ideas you have had for your business into a plan of action. Give yourself a number of options to work over. Some will be great and some won't fit. Get more than one so you always have a back up when you start a home business.

Look to 3 sources for ideas:

A hobby you love: You won't find many hobbies from which you can't build a business. And since you enjoy doing it, it won't be tedious to "go to work" every day. When you pick something for your business that you sincerely like, you will have fun at doing it.

Your experiences: In life we go though many experiences and you can use these to build a business. For example if you have raised children you can then put all your parenting experience together and start a business related to parenting.

Your talents: Everyone has one or more talents within them. Dig down and see what yours are. You can start a freelance business using your talents.

Defining your niche market:
1. List out some ideas then put them in the order of what you like the best.
2. Go to the site listed here and put a key word into the overture suggestion tool box: This will bring up the amount of searches that have been done for your keyword and will represent demand.
3. If you search out that same key word on Google search engine http://google.com/ then you will see websites supplying that item and you will know how many competitors are out there that will be competing with you when you start a home business
4. If you find a topic that is demanded in quantity but low in the suppliers, you will then make money. This should be your special market for which you do your niche marketing. You will make more money with a niche market as you will reduce and sometimes even eliminate competition. Go through your list of ideas until you narrow it down to about
5. Then go through them again and see which one will fit into a niche market.

Establishing your USP: Once you have found the concept that fits into a specialized or niche market it is time to establish your USP, Unique, Selling, Point. This is when you will take your idea, and see how you will make your business uniquely different from your competitors. Often neglected, finding the USP is something that new business owners need to do to set their item above the competition.

Online businesses are very competitive and you have to stay ahead of the game. There are two reasons you need to set yourself up as different from others:
1. Get ahead of your competitors
2. To clearly define to your potential customers why your product and service is better than your competitors.

Deciding on your business model: Part of your business concept will not only be consolidating your ideas but also choosing your business model. There are a few that you can choose from:
* Affiliate marketing-Getting involved with affiliate programs will target your efforts
* Network marketing (MLM)- again this will target your market and idea.
* Marketing-taking the product and selling it
* Service- you should use your talents, which includes freelancing. You can see there are a number of things you will have to do to get your business concept into operation.

But it's worth it to plan and take care in developing it. It will be your foundation, after all.