A 5-Step Formula To Find Your Niche

I recently sent out a survey to my email list asking. "When it comes to Starting And Growing an Online Business, what's your single biggest challenge right now?"

(By the way, if you haven’t taken the survey yet, you can do that here.)

So many of your responses were in the realm of,

• “I can’t decide on a market/idea/niche," or,
• "I'm not sure which idea to pick" and
• "I'm nervous about wasting my time on something that’s not going to be profitable."

In fact, here are some of your actual responses:

• "My challenge is figuring out what I want to do. I have a full time day job I Iove but I need some more income."
• "Deciding on a business."
• "Finding the information to get started and analysis paralysis. I worry about wasting time and money."
• "Knowing If there is a market for the content you are providing."
• "What business to go into."
• "Figuring out what niche."
• "Where to start."

So, if you’re struggling with finding a market/idea/niche, here are some simple brainstorming questions to help you "prime the pump" and get the brainstorming juices flowing (making sure to remember that in brainstorming, there are no bad ideas).

• What are some subjects you love to talk about?
• What are you genuinely interested in?
• If you had a whole day to research a subject, what would it be?
• What subject(s) could you talk about for hours on end?
• What do people tell you you’re good at?
• What kinds of issues do people come to you for advice?
• What subjects do you love to teach?
• On what topics would you consider yourself to know more than most people?

Some good additional questions to ask (from Sunny Lenarduzzi):

• What is a problem/hurdle you've overcome?
• What is a skill you've mastered?
• What's the most painful thing you've ever been through?
• What makes you different from anyone on the planet?
• What's the most transformational business or life experience that you have and want to share with people?
• If you were forced to get up on stage and do a Ted Talk right now, (no preparation, no plan, just go), what would it be?

As you start to define and narrow down your topic and who you’ll serve, you’ll want to ask deeper probing questions (to friends, family and social media).

• Question 1: When it comes to [Your Topic], what's your single biggest challenge right now?
• Question 2: When it comes to [Your Topic], what's your single biggest hope/dream/goal/aspiration right now?

By the way, these particular exercises can be found in my FREE START. An Online Business quick start guide... AND the next question (and it’s a REALLY important one) to ask is:

What are people willing to pay for (once you start creating products or selling services)?

Now, there's a little trick to this that involves asking your people some specific questions ins a specific way, which I'll cover a little later.

But overall, this is the part where you want to start thinking through the intersection of your interests AND what people are willing to pay for to get help and results.

Helpful Insight: Now, don't be discouraged if you’re in a “crowded niche” as those (i.e. fitness, cooking, personal finance, online business, etc.) BECAUSE, we'll be using a 100% data driven method to determine if your niche is either too big, too small or just right.

Once you've landed on a couple of topics in your brainstorming session, you'll want to take the exercise to the next stage which is the, "I want to help people..." stage.

I Want To Help People...

So, to find the target keywords for your niche that we're going to test in the next step, you'll want to phrase your ideas in the following way: "I want to help people [insert your idea].

Some examples:

I want to help people "get out of debt".

I want to help people "learn how to care for the elderly".

I want to help people "learn how to speak Chinese".

As a result of this exercise you'll more readily be able to frame your target keywords in this way:

Keyword: "get out of debt" - that's a pretty obvious one.

Keyword: "elder care" - Instead of "learn how to care for the elderly".

Keyword: "learn chinese" - Removing the "learn how to speak" part.

Also. some EXCELLENT market brainstorming resources in Ryan Levesque’s book “Choose. - The Single Most Important Decision Before Starting Your Business”, and I’ll leave a link in the video description below. It's a $10 offer for the book that comes with an additional $200 of awesome bonuses including the audiobook.

Now the next step, once you narrow down some ideas, we can then take those keywords and do some data driven research to see how much demand there is for your keyword topics in the market, which I cover exactly how to do in this video here.

So, I'm waiting to show you over in this video right here...