How To Narrow Down A Niche

At this point, you might intuitively have a good idea of a niche, or be leaning towards a niche, that you want may want to turn it into a business.

Or you might have a few that you want to explore further.

If you don’t, no worries as the next exercise will help to narrow down the niche.

Grab the top 3 niches that you are interested in, or the top 1, and do the following exercise.

Identifying Categories & Sub Sub Categories

Step through each niche in your list, and start listing off sub categories and sub, sub categories that you would typically associate with the niche. This will create a tree like structure of niches and sub niches as shown in the example below.

Now I don’t know if there is such a term called “sub, sub categories”, I may have made it up, or there could be a better or more proper way to describe it, but I think you know what I’m talking about, so I’m just gonna use it in this example.

Remember, you’re working with a list of niches that you already have either knowledge on, or are interested in, so I am assuming that you have a base knowledge of the niche, or you have a desire to learn more about the niche.

Your aim is to clearly identify a specific “pocket of people” in the niche / category that you want to target all of your website content towards.

Doing so, will help you to create an ideal customer, visitor or create an avatar in your minds eye, which will give you parameters when creating content. You’ll understand how important this is as you move through the training.

Having this clear image of who you’re marketing too, means your content is driven by the need to engage with your audience and not by money.

I know this might seem to be counter intuitive, as earning money is obviously our aim here, but money is the by-product of visitor engagement, just like building bigger muscles is the by-product of lifting heavy weights.

So here’s an example of how you could start narrowing down a niche.

Singing – niche

  • Acapella singing
    • Bass singer
    • Baritone singer
    • Second Tenor singer
    • First Tenor
  • Singing lessons
    • Online singing lessons
  • Singing in a band
    • Lead vocal
    • Backup singers
  • Getting pitch right?

I don’t know a lot about singing, hence the list, but I could do some research in Google about it – if I’m interested in it, as this will help me to come up with more sub categories and more sub, sub categories.

So for this list I would either focus on Acapella singers because I know a little bit about it, or maybe go down to the next level – Bass singers, because I’m a big fan of Bass singers.

Yep … in thinking about it … I’d probably go down to the next level, because I feel that when someone wants information on Acapella singing, then it’s either a Bass singer, Baritone, Second Tenor or First Tenor.

So “Bass singers” would become my niche, because that’s a specific group of people, and I would focus all of my content around this group.

Here’s another example:

Martial Arts

I know a little bit more about Martial Arts, and I know that most Martial Artists specialize in a specific style of Martial Arts.

Everything seems to revolve around a particular style of Martial Arts.

Even if you don’t know anything about this niche, one thing that you’ve probably heard is, a mother taking their child to Karate lessons, or boxing lessons, or Judo lessons.

I bet you’ve never heard of anyone taking their child to Martial Arts lessons – right?

So my list will start off like this.

  • Martial Arts
    • What style of Martial Arts
      • Kick Boxing
      • Judo
      • Kung Fu
      • Praying Mantis
        • Southern Style Praying Mantis
        • Northen Style Praying Mantis
      • Tai Chi
      • Wing Chun
      • Karate
        • List of Karate styles.
    • Mixed Martial Arts
    • Onine Martial Arts Courses?
    • Online Martial Arts Equipment
      • Kick Boxing
      • Judo
      • Kung Fu
      • Karate
      • Mixed Martial Arts
    • Online Martial Arts Clothing
      • Karate
        • Gee (Uniform)
        • Belts (White, Red … Black Belt)
        • T-shirts
    • Online Martial Arts weapons
    • Best Martial Arts schools
    • Martial Arts conditioning

So in this example, I would simply pick a style of Martial Arts like (Wing Chun), because that’s a pretty specific group of people in the Martial Arts niche.

Understand that there could be online courses, clothing, weapons etc etc that I could become an affiliate of and promote to my niche.

Computer programming

Coming from a computer programming background, I know this niche is a lot like the Martial Arts niche, because everything seems to revolve around a particular programming language.

Software developers usually specialize in a particular language, and as such would be searching for information pertaining to a single computer programming language.

  • Computer Programming
    • What language?
      • C
      • C++
      • Php
      • Java
      • Dot Net
    • Online lessons
      • C
      • C++
      • Php
      • Java
      • Dot Net
    • Online Book purchase
    • Online tutorials

Therefore I would simply pick a language like (Php), because anyone who is specifically interested in learning the Php programming language would be my audience.

So your aim is to step down from niche to sub niche to sub, sub niche until you find a specific group you can engage with.

How do you know if you have gone too far into the sub niche or not far enough?

Let’s work through and example using the research on Martial Arts above.

I could niche it down to Martial Arts and stay there, but then my audience is too broad.

Who am I actually writing my content for? It could be for a Kung Fu person, a Kick boxer, a Karate person – it’s just too broad.

So lets go down to the next level where I could stop at Kung Fu, but then there are so many styles of Kung Fu to choose from, where do I start, Wing Chun, Tai Chi, Praying Mantis? They all have a different audiences – right?

We’re getting closer, so lets step down to the next level.

Wing Chun – now that’s a specific group of people. So I could quite easily start there if I wanted to.

There could be further distinctions within the Wing Chun niche that I could go even deeper on, but for now, understanding that I am going to be communicating with people who have an interest in the Wing Chun style of Martial Arts is a good place to start.

Praying Mantis, whilst that’s a specific Martial Arts sub category, there is a distinction between Southern Style Praying Mantis and Northern Style Praying Mantis. And whilst they share similarities, there are enough differences to suggest that they should have their own respective niches.

So in this case I would make “Southern Style Praying Mantis” a niche all by itself, and do the same for Northern style Mantis, because each niche attracts a different audience.

Hopefully, you have a much better idea now of how you can narrow down your niche.

Next thing to do is to start collecting content ideas that will help give your website some direction.

Go to Step 3 here – Gathering Intelligence Using The WA Keyword Tool

 

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Frank

Entrepreneur, Blogger, Affiliate Marketer and webmaster of Stealth Secrets. I have been earning a full-time living as an affiliate marketer since 2004. Want to do the same? Check out what I recommend.