What is a Niche Exactly?

What is a niche exactly? To best answer this question, it might be easiest to reply with, what isn’t a niche? You see, virtually everything around us, everything we use, everything we can possibly learn about or know, everything we experience falls into one category or another.

A niche, simply put then, is a category. But within those categories there are sub-categories, or sub-niches where everything in the universe can fit in its own place.

Take for example your home. Inside your home is the kitchen, which is a portion of your home, so it could be considered a niche called the “kitchen area.”

Inside your kitchen is the “eating area,” and the “cooking area.” Two niches inside a niche.

In the cooking area there are cabinets that you’ve organized to hold different things that you’ll need to prepare and serve meals. Each of those cabinets would then be a niche in their own right. And you may even have separate niches within each cabinet too, depending on how many shelves each cabinet contains.

Can we break it down even further?  How about those shelves? You might have a shelf in one cabinet that holds plates and bowls. This gives you the “plate section,” and the “bowl section.” Again, two separate niches on just one shelf!

We probably could go on and on, but you see the point, right?

Any main topic can be broken down into smaller niches, and most often those smaller niches can be broken down further and further until they get really, really specific.

This explains why niche marketing is so popular. Considering that anything and everything could be viewed as a niche, the supply of niche topics is endless. This gives anyone thinking about generating sales a relatively open field of choices no matter how many other people are doing it too.

But as the saying goes, all things may be possible, but not all things may be advantageous. You could narrow yourself so deeply into a niche where your prospective customers are so few, it’d be hardly worth the time to build a site around it.

Or you could find a great keyword rich niche with a lot of daily searches, but everyone doing the searching are only looking for free information without a buyer in the crowd.

You see, we’ve only defined what a niche is, but we haven’t even begun to discuss how to sell in one. This next point is key because, although niche marketing can be rather lucrative, it can also be a huge time waster if its not understood and done correctly.

So we need to talk about the difference between a niche and a “niche market.” Most people don’t realize there’s a difference.

Stay tuned . . .