Analyzing your competition
Analyzing your competition is an essential step in choosing your niche.Almost every business has competition, either indirect or direct. Some
competitors are ruthless, so make sure that you are careful when you are examining the competitors in your niche before you enter it. While it is true that you need to be aware of your competition, you shouldn’t feel intimidated by them.
Determining How Many Competitors There Are
in The Niche
The first step to analyzing your competition is to figure out how many competitors are currently in your potential niche. To do this,you can use a simple Google Search to calculate, which websites are targeting the same keywords as you.
If you find sites that are using the same keywords in their site’s URL, title,and anchor text, then you know that there is some serious competition for those keywords. You can also use Google Search with your key phrases in quotes to find out how many competing web pages there are online. You can use website resources like SEOmoz (https://moz.com),to find out how many backlinks the competition has.
Your biggest competitors will be those sites which show up at the top of the search engines for the top three most competitive keywords in your niche.
Researching the Competition
The difficulty of ranking higher than your competitors will depend mainly on the Page Rank (PR) of their websites and relevant web pages.If the average PR of the top ten sites is below PR3, then it should take you under three months to rank for the keyword.Using SEO Quake (https://seoquake.com), you can find out theaverage PR of the top ten websites for each of your keywords.
To analyze your competitors PR, you can create a spreadsheet that is divided into two sheets, with one labeled "Preliminary," and one marked "Market Competition." Place the top ten keywords in the "Preliminary"sheet. On the other sheet, create ten columns, labeling them; "Site1PR,""Site2PR," etc., up to "Site10PR."
Next, take the best three to five different search terms and put them in the "Market Competition" sheet. Then search Google using the top three keywords. Note the PR of the top ten websites for each of the three to
five keywords that you listed. Then remove the highest and lowest PRs and calculate the average PR for each row, as well as overall. After you've conducted as many searches as you think are necessary, make a shortlist of all the keywords for which you believe you can rank highly.
Evaluating the Competition
When you feel like you’ve found a niche to test, and you know the niche’s subject matter well enough, you can create a report, eBook, short article,or white paper that provides some vital information about the benefits of your new business products or services without compromising any of your intellectual property.You can use this free information as bait to acquire responses from your potential customers.
Over the last several decades, internet marketers have proven that people respond best to ethical bribes, where you offer potential customers something in return for their email address or personal details. This is why publishers of informational products provide free giveaways in return for email subscriptions. Many larger brands haven’t discovered this tactic yet, which means you can get a leg up on the competition by utilizing this strategy.
Consider Your Competition’s Pricing
If you discover your niche has serious competition during your research,subscribe to their email list to see what they’re doing. Look to see if they are selling higher priced products and services, or are all their products and services discounted? If you uncover higher prices, then you know that there is a market. If they’ve continued to offer high priced goods for many years, then you know that there is definitely a market that is
sustainable.
If you discover that the average price for a product in the niche has a reasonable profit margin, then it will allow for smaller players to enter the market and co-exist with the larger, established brands. However, if the market competes on price alone, and the profit margins have been squeezed until they are paper thin, then you might be better off looking at a less competitive niche with better profit margins.
You also want to be aware of competitors discounting each other in a small market. When this happens, you could end up struggling just to get your business off the ground. However, when there are several tiers of pricing in a niche, it can be a lot easier to not only get into the market but slowly increase your prices as well.
Generally, when it comes to search engine competition, the lower the number of competitors, the better. However, if you discover a niche that has no competition, you need to be cautious because this could mean that there is no money to be made in the niche.
Finding your ideal costumer
Your ideal customer is the one who is willing to pay for the solution to their particular problem. This means that you can find your perfect customer by going where they go and offering helpful advice and solutions to their problems.
There are several ways that you can provide solutions for your customers like creating free content that will encourage them to view you as an expert. When they view you as an expert, they will be more likely to pay for your paid content. The one thing that you don’t want to do is to treat the free content that you provide dismissively.
You should look at the free content that you provide potential customers like the free samples at Costco. One taste will hopefully convince people to buy the entire package. The whole package might transform their initial purchase into a long relationship between a new,now loyal customer who becomes a repeat buyer of your products. And if they can’t continue to buy the same product, they might be more willing to try your other products as they become available.
When you always provide your customers with what they need and knowing them well, makes you seem as though you can anticipate their needs. This creates the kind of ideal customer who will continue to buy from you month after month and year after year. The more loyal, repeat customers that you gain, the more recurring income you will receive.
You can start to build your email marketing list so you can begin to test the viability of your niche, by offering a free newsletter, download, or both. This will allow you to market products and services of interest on a regular basis. When you can gain your customers' trust based on your expertise, many of them will buy what you recommend. These are the kinds of customers that you need to find or create with high-quality interactions.
Researching and Surveying Your Target Market
Once you've decided on a profitable niche, it's time to focus on pinpointing precisely what is the target audience's pain points. You need to determine their most urgent and critical problems related to your niche. When you can identify the issues your ideal customers are experiencing, you can provide them with the best solution and increase your niche’s profitability.
To identify a need in any niche, you need to start looking at the problems that you face in your own life. Take some time to consider what you would improve in your life or what could take away one of your own life's challenges. An excellent place to look for these answers is on niche
forums or favorite blogs. Yahoo Answers (https://answers.yahoo.com) is an excellent resource for determining what solutions people are searching for regarding their problems. Quora (https://www.quora.com) also works similarly.
You can use the search terms, "help with," "cure for," "advice on,"followed by your specific keyword to obtain a list of questions people are asking.
The solution to your target audience’s problems will be where you can see the most profits, whether you offer a physical product, a service, a digital product, or information. You can also use Google Correlate (https://google.com/trends/correlate) to find queries with a similar
pattern to a target data series. The target can either be a real-world trend that you provide, or it can be a question that you enter.You can then view the results on the site or download them into a .CSV file so you can analyze it further.
Utilize Online Surveys
You can use online resources like Survey Monkey(https://surveymonkey.com),SurveyGizmo (https://surveygizmo.com), and Google Ads to send online surveys to question your target audience to find out exactly what they want. The stronger the demand and desire for your product or services, the more likely your target audience will be to participate in the survey. You can use incentives like discounts, free downloadable products, or online services the users expected to find when they clicked on your advertisement to get more people to complete your surveys.You want to aim for receiving 1,000 responses or more to your online survey, to obtain a good cross-section of your market. With this cross section, you will be able to calculate if enough people are participating in the survey to suggest an affordable response rate. From the information that you gather from the online survey you should be able to provide your potential customers with:
• Precisely what they are looking for;
• Exactly the way they want it;
• And at a price, they are prepared to buy it for.
The answers you receive from the survey will also provide you with the language that you need to use when you write your sales copy.
When you send out your survey's you want to be sure to not only ask about the problems they are experiencing and how difficult it is to find the solutions to those problems, but you also want to try and obtain demographic information as well, like age, job, education level, etc. You can even ask them how much they'd pay for a solution and how they would like it delivered.
There is a qualitative difference between market intelligence, like that,gathered from a survey, and keyword intelligence. Market intelligence can be more valuable because it allows you to obtain accurate and confident information to make decisions regarding marketing and strategic decisions.
The time you spend researching your niche and the ideal customer will be time well spent because you will gather enough ideas on products to create, provided that you have found a niche that is willing to pay for solutions to their problems.
Building relationship with your Niche
Now that you’ve chosen a profitable niche, it’s time you start to think about building the relationships within that niche. This will require you to locate the main sites, blogs, discussion boards, and forums that are associated with your niche. Take some time to look through each of these resources to see what topics are being discussed that pertain to your chosen niche. Write the five most prevalent issues that you discover are being considered. This will give you a good start for content ideas for your newsletter, blog, and possibly a free special report that you can provide your potential customers for providing you with their email address.
Posting regular content on your social media networks will help to keep your followers updated on your business and make it much easier for them to pass along the information to anyone they know that might be interested in your products or services. Make it a point to always ask for re-tweets and shares and train your target audience to take the actions that you want them to take when you want them to take them.
One of the main reasons why you wanted to start an online business was to make money. However, if this is your only motivation, the chances are high that it will show. Unlike a brick and mortar store, people online don't have to be polite. They can click off your site, and you will never see them again, and you will never even know. If you can register them for an e-course or your newsletter, you'll have a better chance of communicating with them regularly and building a relationship with them, further building your brand.
Recent studies show that it takes at least 17 exposures to a brand or business before people will start to recognize the brand and understand what it does and what it represents. Unfortunately, an online business usually doesn't get a second chance to make an excellent first
impression.
Email Marketing
Your email marketing campaigns are a valuable resource that will provide you with a lifeline of communication with those who have shown an interest in your niche. You can use your email marketing campaigns to provide your target audience with different reasons to opt-in, such as newsletters and special reports. If your target audience purchases an item, you can put them on a new list specifically for new customers.
Once you get them on a list, it can be a bit of a challenge to keep them there. This is why providing an e-course that contains several lessons spaced out and delivered through an autoresponder is a good idea if you want to keep the lines of communication with your target audience open.
If you have people that unsubscribe, don't take it personally, but to see if they give a reason. Some people will take the time to tell you why the unsubscribed. Others will leave and never let you know if you have offended them in some way. You just never know what the tipping point will be for customers.
Your Social Media Networks
Your social media networks can also help you build relationships within your niche. Your followers on Facebook can like, comment,and share your information. This means that all of the people in their network can also see what you post. This is a powerful marketing and relationship-building opportunity that can bring you free traffic and sales.
Your Newsletter
Your newsletter is your chance to send your customers new and exciting content on a regular basis that is directly related to your niche.You can review common issues in FAQs, provide quizzes, announce new products and services, and so much more. You can use all the information you’ve gathered from the forums and discussion boards that you’ve visited to provide them with the answers to the problems that you know they are experiencing.In this way, you are building relationships and positioning yourself in your niche as an expert without resorting to aggressive sales tactics. You are providing them with offers that a customer in your niche will be interested in acquiring. You can choose to email the offers separately,on a particular day, or placed within your newsletter.
It is all about providing your customers with the answers to their questions and building a relationship with them to show you how you can meet their needs. It is all about staying on topic and giving them a range of options that are related to your niche.
Conclusion
The best way for you to be successful with your online business is to choose a profitable niche. There will always be cracks in the consumer populace whose demands for specific products and series aren’t being dealt with, which gives you the opportunity to supply those unmet demands.
A small business like yours can benefit from the needs that are left unaddressed. The issue is how you can find the right niche market that will help your small business become successful.Having a unique or exceptional product will ensure you have less competition.
Researching a niche to determine if it is viable and profitable requires you to have patience, put in the effort, the right set of tools, and the ability to ask the right questions and understand the answers that you receive.
To be successful, you have to do the research. If you choose not to research your potential niche markets thoroughly, you will do nothing more than waste your time, energy and money. Finding the right niche for your business isn't a complicated process, but it will take you some time, but it will be well worth it when you start seeing your business grow and your profits increase.
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