How Small Should Your Niche Be?

Is Small Really Good In Niche Marketing?

That's a hard question to answer categorically, definitively. A lot depends upon your goals for the niche.

If you are selling or offering specific products or services of interest to a small sub-group of a broader niche market, you might do well by breaking down your target audience into interest-based categories.

The smaller these groups are, the better and more effective your marketing results will be. I have seen it happen with email marketing, where tightly targeted groups are often the most responsive.

But even if you are going after a broader niche, there is no reason you cannot segment it into separate, more narrowly niched sub-groups.

One way to cluster your audience is by creating specialized 'sub-niche' content for them. For instance, for a home-based business audience, you might offer products and services in sub-niches like:

* marketing
* product creation
* fulfillment services
* ongoing education
* networking
* legal
* accounting
* asset protection
* taxes

Each of these are of interest to some of your general target market. So you might create an information product (an ecourse, or report, or ebook) on the smaller topic - and offer it to your general audience. The ones who are interested in the sub-niche will respond to your offer - and by collecting their details, you now have a smaller group within your target audience, but one that has evinced interest in one specific aspect of it.

A few people will have interests that span different categories - and that's fine too.

Or to take another example, if you are building a list of contacts to keep informed about a general topic, and generate your revenue from either charging a membership fee for the information, or sell related products and services to the audience, the broader your niche the better.

On the other hand, if your product or service is a specialized one not relevant to many people in the niche (e.g. you have something for elderly women, which rules out men and young women), you'd do better by defining your niche more narrowly.

There isn't any such thing as the PERFECT niche. What's important is how targeted it is to your goals.

If you go after a broader, more general niche, you'll more likely have a lot of competition. The narrower and more specific your niche market, the greater your chances of being one of a few (if not the only) player in your field.

On the downside, even if you increase your marketing efforts in these smaller niches many times over, you may not get much more benefit from it because you have already reached saturation point.

So if you go after such niches, you might consider having other niches to work in, so that this becomes only one of multiple streams of income from your online activities.