Choosing a Niche for Your Online Business: 3 Creative Models

Choosing a Niche for Your Online Business: 3 Creative Models

Reader Comments (11)

  1. Just being “new” is also a great niche. Google has a bias for new, as Sean Jackson write about here: https://copyblogger.com/query-deserves-freshness/

    Just by being the latest person to writea solid article about “Calls to Action” you have a shot at Google “auditioning” your content with a high ranking.

    Facebook and Twitter also have a bias for new. Being the latest thing people see in their streams is powerful.

    According to a study by Mailchimp, newsletters subscribers are biased to new. Your brand new subscriber is apt to open your emails at a higher rate than a newsletter they’ve been subscribed to for 4 months or more. http://blog.mailchimp.com/subscriber-engagement-half-life/

    Of course, “new” wears off, and fast. But it’s just enough time for you to figure out which of the other 4 ways you should niche yourself going forward.

  2. Hi Sonia, nice article and well thought out, but one thing that leapt out at me was the comment:

    “Back in the day, creating a “niche website” meant building a compact site around an under-served keyword phrase, pulling out all the SEO stops to get it to rank, then loading it up with affiliate offers. That was tidy, and some did very well with it, but it doesn’t work today.”

    How can you say that doesn’t work today, and what’s your rationale behind this particular statement?

    That’s not my personal experience, and as an individual and business have a large portfolio of websites already working, and more in progress that do exactly this.

    Is it your own research or just comments others have made on social media that made you state that? I just don’t believe it’s true that this strategy doesn’t work anymore and have multiple examples of it doing so.

    Just my two pennies 🙂

    • It’s ferociously hard to rank for any remotely competitive keyword without a more robust content strategy than this. If the keyword is long-tail enough, it’s easier … but typically that means there’s also less opportunity for revenue.

      If it’s working for you, I wish you well with it, but I don’t recommend it to anyone starting today. Not to say it can’t work, but I’ve seen a lot of attempts crash and burn.

  3. So, to conclude, there is 4 ways to approaching the online niche :
    1. Create everything that relates to the niche
    2. Partnering with the professional
    3. Promoting the local
    4. Linking with my own personality

    What i want to ask is, if we create a free content how do we know what we create is good for our audience? What will be the judgement for it? I have create something that has a lot of viewer but less shared or none at all, how to deal with that kind of situation?

    • Those are four possibilities, but you can always come up with new ones. 🙂

      If you’re not getting shares or other reactions, it sounds like it’s not working well for your audience. Find some members of the audience you want to serve and get to know them better.

      Your content might be thin or generic, or it may not be solving a problem that your audience cares much about.

  4. It seems that often the audience is the last thing that is taken into consideration. However, figuring out who your audience is should really be one of the first steps in creating a niche site or blog.

    I especially like how you bring the biology definition of niche into the post.

    • You can’t really make anything work in any business until you truly understand who you serve and how you serve them.

      I don’t fault any business for focusing on revenue models — we’re in business to bring revenue in, and that’s totally great. But you have to keep that balance, always. The audience is where all the good stuff comes from.

  5. Useful, brilliant, and inspiring as always. Special thanks for the art. We all need that joy of creativity and the calm of Bob Ross (and yes, I too loved Bill Alexander. Bavarian accent???) these days.

    • Lori, you’ll appreciate this: One of Bill Alexander’s family is in Authority. That’s what brought him back onto my radar — I very fondly remember watching him on PBS way back in the day. 🙂

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