The niche

Sep 23, 2018

Define your niche, your tribe. Those who belong to that tribe will strive to buy your product or at least will be strongly attracted, because it is specially made for them

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You can’t provide a service that is perfect for everyone. One of the main problems of those who start is to consider a too wide variety of people as their own potential customers.

This makes the business too generic, which makes it too complicated to emerge. Your product or service will inevitably be too focused, because you have to conform to the least common denominator.

Create the perfect product for a niche. What is a niche? As Wikipedia puts it, it’s “the subset of the market on which a specific product is focused”.

It may seem counterintuitive, in fact you want more people to buy the product you make. Why focusing on a subset of the market?

The answer is that you can’t reach a general audience with a generalist product and please everyone. Instead, make the perfect product for a slice of that audience, so they are 100% satisfied.

For example, this post addresses those who:

are about to undertake a business
want to do it alone
want to have an online business
want to use the Internet to sell their products
value the most freedoms and flexibility over mere profit

This excludes anyone who:

do not want to undertake a business
want to do an offline business
want to have one or more business partners
have already started a business
want to make a pile of money at the expense of time and health
do not have a computer
do not like working on the Internet

Having filtered my audience, it’s true that a very high percentage of the population will not be interested in it. Instead, I want to write the perfect post for you, as you match the requirements of my target niche.

Define your niche, your tribe. Those who belong to that tribe will strive to buy your product or at least will be strongly attracted, because it is specially made for them. It is fundamental to first define the boundaries of your niche, then to reach those who meet these requirements with a product or service that people want.

Two examples:

If you are interested in selling on Amazon, what will be more interesting to you, a podcast that talks about business in general, or a podcast that every week interviews a person who sells successfully on Amazon?
If you are looking for a diving suit, you will go to a sports shop that sells “a little bit of everything“ or you go to the water sports shop, that perhaps requires a longer drive but has an experienced and passionate shopkeeper, who can better advise you than the clerk of the general sports shop who has never set foot in the water? Maybe in the big sports shop you will find a cheaper price, but will it be a quality and lasting purchase?

These two examples are enough to determine a concept: focusing is always better. By specializing yourself, you are perfect for a small circle of people, rather than mediocre for a larger circle. Marketing to these people will be simpler, because you’ll probably find that everyone is participating in the same Facebook or forum group, and the competition will be very little.

You may choose a niche too small, but it is better to make an error of being too much specialized, rather than the opposite.

The magic of the niche is that a specialized niche is too small for a too big competitor who will ignore the slice of the market where you want to focus.

Here comes your uniqueness: the key factor that you, and only you, can bring to that niche.

Tagged: Business · All topics

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