Niche – Misunderstandings and the Market

You’ve probably read a hundred articles on subjects such as the ‘top ten tips on choosing your niche’ or ‘how to make a load of cash from this niche’ and they are all probably much the same.  So instead of providing a re-hash of all of these same articles, which are of dubious use to the budding internet entrepreneur, I’m going to use a little deconstruction here to get to the much misunderstood root of the how’s and why’s of developing your niche.

First, as this is a deconstruction of the concept, it is important to define what it is we are talking about.  A niche, in purely marketing terms, is a concept that has been around for countless years, and describes the exact position of your product in ‘the market’.  A good thought experiment is to imagine the world’s biggest shoe shop, selling every conceivable type of shoe and footwear.  There are sneakers, there are brogues, wellingtons, galoshes and flip flops, and we have, in fact, a store which is the size of seven football stadiums.  As a customer you cannot be expected to trawl through miles and miles of shoe racking to find the pair of shoes you want. Shopping for a pair of shoes would take you a number of days.  So the store has, quite sensibly, developed a number of sections and sub sections for different types of shoe.  Broadly these fall into categories such as ‘dress shoe’, ‘sneaker’, ‘work boots’ and so on.  Imagine that you are after a pair of good stout work shoes and, thanks to the clever organisation of the store, you are able to find the work shoe section easily. But as this is the store which sells every shoe available on the planet it is a pretty big section even so, about the size of half a football stadium.  If the store wants its customers to return it will have done a few things to this section, it will have broken it down into a number of sub sections.  Imagine further, that the shoes you want are steel capped, full ankle boots, with non-slip soles and made from black leather.  I think you will agree that this is a fairly specific requirement.  I would imagine that the store would have divided the section into capped and non-capped fairly early on in its organisation of work shoes, so we are now dealing with an area a quarter of the size of a football stadium.  Within this section there would probably be a distinction between shoes and boots, roughly half again, so now we are dealing with an eighth of a football stadium, and so on until you find, with relative ease, the small section selling the shoes you want to buy.

The niche you develop works in exactly the same way as the above example, it allows you as the vendor to create a very specific online presence, for a very specific internet user.  This, the difference between the creator and the user, is the second part of the deconstruction.  In creating your idea you will inject an enormous amount of yourself and your own personality into it.  Whatever your niche is you will choose it in part because of what you believe you can bring that’s fresh and interesting.  Web media lives, or more often dies, on its content, and if that content is not fresh, interesting and unique, you will not retain your customers.  Whilst page rank and SEO are important aspects of web marketing, having content that keeps bringing people back to you day in day out, will ensure that your site goes from strength to strength, and generates the all important word of mouth, or viral presence.

So, the question is do you generate content that you find interesting, or that you think your users will find interesting?  The answer lies somewhere in between, as your niche should appeal to both yourself and your end user.  If it does not appeal to yourself you will never create or edit the quality of content that you need. If it is not appealing to the user, no one will visit.

So where does this short deconstruction of the niche leave us?  With two important points, I hope.  Firstly, careful consideration needs to be undertaken to understand where you’re going to place yourself in ‘the world’s biggest shoe shop’, for this is what the internet has become.  Particular emphasis needs to be placed on not only how you place yourself, but also how easy it will be for your user to find your ‘place’.  Secondly, when you have found your place, you need to fill it with content that works from your perspective – in that you feel the passion and interest in the subject —- never forgetting that it is the end user who must ultimately judge you on the content of your site.  This is not an easy job, and I wish you luck.