The Real Deal Offline Series: How To Pick The Best Offline Niches To Go After...

Hey Offliners,

If you're struggling to find a target offline niche to go after, I may be able to offer you some golden advice that really helped me out. In fact, I came up with this after personally struggling for a while and it finally dawned on me that finding a niche to target is the most important thing you can do.

Yes, it's even more important than finding a foot-in-the-door service to offer, because if you find a niche to target, your foot-in-the-door service will become very obvious to you.

What I found is that all offline guru's say focus on a niche, but most don't actually give you much practical advice on how to select a niche. Sure, they give you a list of industries that they copied from the yellow pages, but that didn't really help me much.

Now, to be completely honest with you, there are times when I'm launching a service or product that I do take a wide and general approach to start and then narrow it down as I get market feedback.

However, when I say wide and general approach, what I mean is that I'll take a offline product and do small but valuable customizations for 4+ niches and then launch them. The ones that get the most leads, sales and interest will be the niche I'll focus on.

However, that's an advanced strategy that most offliners shouldn't really be trying unless you're further along in your business.

So here's my formula for finding a offline niche to target:

Step 1: Can I find or identify real or perceived market need that's not being filled.

The easiest clients to sign up for monthly contracts are the clients who desperately want what I'm offering. And the only way to find these customers is to do research into various niche markets and see what's not being offered.

Let me say that again: There's no way to find the right niche to target unless you do some research and some testing.

If you just blindly start going after niches with random service offerings, then don't be surprised when months have gone by and you don't even have one or two clients.

You must do the legwork first.

Step 2: Can you actually deliver on what you found to be a real or perceived market need or have the ability to seamlessly outsource it?

Now, here's where the rubber meets the road. As you're doing your niche research and testing you're looking for opportunities in the market place. Good examples are mobile websites, facebook fanpages and QR for starters. However, you must be able to deliver the goods after cashing the check.

During my niche research over the years, I've stumbled across a couple of situations in which I couldn't deliver on the market need.

A huge ecommerce website is a perfect example. From my perspective, I just don't have the ability or desire to do ecommerce websites for clients because they literally consume every minute of my life for months on end.

Part 3: Do you have a passion for the niche or at least for the process of providing the services you're offering?

If you're going to be doing something full time or even part time, then you better make sure that you can enjoy some part of the process.

For example, I don't personally love flowers, but I do love the process of building a local florist a website, getting the top 50 keywords and putting together a campaign to get those keywords ranked high in Google. Then, creating a offline mailing campaign to drive customers to their shop.

See what I mean?

I don't love flowers, but I love the marketing side of flowers.

Hope this helps,

Chris Rivers