Hello,

I hope everyone had an amazing and very productive week

I am going to shift focus on this blog for a little bit and start teaching you the best way I know how to go about building a successful business in a step-by-step format :) 

This week we are going to discuss how to pick a niche to build your business around!

First off… what is a niche?

The niche is the general market in which your product or service is in.  For example, if you have a product called “How to loose 10 pounds in 10 days” your general niche would be “health and fitness”  you would then drill down that niche to “diet and weight loss” getting even more specific you would say the niche is “fast weight loss”

We start at the top with very general niche categories and then drill down to ultimately discover the perfect specific niche and then the perfect products/services to promote (which we will discuss next week).   

And to do this what do we start with???

I’ll give you a big hint… NOTHING is more important for your business

That’s right… we start with keyword research!

Well, that doesn’t have to be entirely true :)  To make this easier, what we can do is pick a general niche by going to a directory online and look at the broad general categories available there.  The reason we want to do this (rather than simply pick a niche from thin air) is because we want to make sure we are only targeting profitable niches.  By looking at the types of sites and products that are available we know that the more common a type of site is, the more profitable the niche is.  So we want things that are already out there, niches that are already making money for others and then we will simply target that niche differently so that you get your piece of the market share

For example, you could go to a directory such as www.bestoftheweb.com and look at only the top categories and think about what you want to focus your business around.  Let’s for example pick “sports.” Clicking on the top category level of “sports” will take us to a page that lists various sub-niches within the blanketed sports niche.  This sub-niche is where you are going to pick your “general” niche from.  Lets pick “tennis” for our example that we will use throughout these weekly lessons. 

This is where you will now start completing some keyword research to find perfect keyword phrases within this niche.  I want you to follow Step 1 in The Website Traffic Surge Process to discover your perfect keyword phrases this week.  Depending on whether you choose to complete this manually or with software, the process will take you between an hour and about 15 hours of work.  Either method works, so choose one or the other and start your keyword research today! 

Make sure you start with the general niche.  In our example, we are using “tennis.”  We will complete this search first, from here, we will also want to complete searches on things such as ”tennis lessons” , “womens tennis” , “play tennis” , “tennis accessories” , “tennis gear” , “tennis equipment” and “tennis racket”  These are all only examples, but are based on the fact that within the general “tennis” niche, each of these have a lot of searches each month, so we want to drill down to discover which market within “tennis” you are going to ultimately build your business around. 

Next week we will talk about picking product(s) and/or service(s) to promote, in the meantime complete your keyword research

Best Wishes,
Shannon