10 Easy Steps to Start Your Online Business (Part 1) | Identify Niche Market

The subsequent pages provide a more detailed guidance and highlights the 10 easy steps that you can follow to start an online business.

1) Identify a Niche Market

Identify Exact Target Market

Identify your exact target market in terms of their demographics such as their gender and age, locality and spending power. Next, determine the problems that they are facing (e.g. facing the issue of chronic fatigue) and then providing the exact solutions to the concern that they are facing (e.g. Identify symptoms of fatigue and finding scientific answers to overcome their tiredness)

Knowing Market Place

Just identifying your target market is not enough. You need to understand their expectations and then meeting these expectations before your customers will buy from you. You can gather much information from other related blogs, chat rooms and online forums to find out the key discussion topics among your niche market. By noting their comments and opinions, you will be able to identify the area of the interests and concerns of your target market.  You can then focus the content of your website to address these identified interests and concerns by providing the suitable products and services to resolve the exact needs of your niche market.

Another suggestion is to visit other competitors’ websites or E-commerce websites like eBay and Amazon to establish the accuracy of your market research. You can ascertain that there is indeed sufficient demand for your identified products if these websites are selling similar items as your area of focus.     

Research on Competitors

In a competitive market, you need to do better than your challengers. You need to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately aims to imitate your competitors’ strengths and strives to do better in their area of weaknesses to gain a competitive edge.

Competitive Pricing


Pricing Strategy

You also need to research on your competitors’ pricing as most products are price sensitively. If you are able to offer similar products at a lower price, it increases your likelihood of outperforming your competitors.   Perform your market research and size up your profit potential. Determine if you can still remain profitable after matching your competitors’ pricing.

Alternatively, justify your higher pricing by marketing and emphasizing the better attributes of your products.

Content of website

Text content is the most important component in generating traffic to your website. You should provide useful information with regards to your customers’ area of interest or concern and ensure regular updating of the information to attract your target market back to your website.

Customers Profiling

After several months in business, you can then identify the demographics of your main customers so that you can focus your future marketing efforts on this target group to generate more sales.

Go to Part 2 (Product Identification and Selling Techniques)...