How is choosing your niche related to marketing your membership site? If you really think about it, everything is pretty much related to marketing. If you have a good idea for a membership site, then you need to think about how to market it before you go ahead and start building it. Why? Because you need to be able to find your target audience, get their eyes on your site, win their trust, and then get them to sign up for your site. There is a huge difference between just a great product and a great product with a paying audience.
One of the biggest determining factor that will impact on how well you market your product is the niche that you choose in the first place. If you choose the right niche, you should be able to find a small and targeted audience of people who are specifically interested in what you are offering. These people can quickly become loyal fans that will listen to what you have to tell them. They would most likely be more engaging with what you have to say. If you choose the wrong niche, you may find yourself struggling to stand out from the crowd and that would make it hard to find enough people to pay for your product.
Selecting A Niche
Pretty much everyone understands that the best niches are ones that people are willing to pay for. This is why niches like dating, making money online and fitness are so popular. They are also quite popular because these are all of our universal concerns. With this universal appeal, the audience size should be extremely large. Think about it: There are very few people online that would not be interest in money, sex or their own health. Because of all these people, heading into these niches would give you the biggest market in terms of potential customers.
But the downsize to these niches is that because they are so massive, this attracts the most competition and competitive sites. There may be a huge pool of customers, but there are a large amount of sites aiming at the same pool. How does that affect your chances in marketing your membership site to these people? Well, it means that there isn’t a clear path where you could reach your audience directly and singularly without competition from other sites trying to take that same customer away from you.
Targeting Your Niches
As an example, let’s say that you are creating a membership site about knitting. Knitting is a very niche topic. There may not be a huge pool of people that would be into knitting, but there will be a number of people. These people would also be searching for knitting information online. With this, you can find other websites about knitting, or a forum, and then post a link to a blog post or your sales page there. Likewise, you could post an advert in online or real paper publications like Creative Knitting Magazine and that would also give you direct access to all the people who read that magazine. Since as a possible under-serviced target market, the number of websites may be limited. As one of the few membership sites about knitting, people will be interested to check it out and hopefully you might get some new subscribers (to run with this idea, your site could easily provide knitting patterns).
Alternatively, if you’re going for a much bigger niche like fitness, then you’ll struggle to find any space on websites or publications that are not already swamped with competing sites. You would also know that some of those other sites will have a lot bigger budget and more money for marketing, and creating a fancy and compelling product. You will need to fight so much harder and spend so much more to just try to get noticed. It is far easier to market your membership site when you have a more targeted niche.
Do you still want to go for one of those big categories? Then the best solution is to find a small niche within that larger category. So for example, instead of picking ‘fitness’, you could pick a more targeted niche like ‘fitness for those over 50’. Instead of picking ‘making money online’, you could pick ’making money online for college students’. With a more targeted niche, you would better position yourself to being able to target and attract the eyes of the targeted pool of people that you are aiming for.
What to look for When Selecting A Niche
So when you are ready to select a niche for your membership site, you need to do so with an eye towards the following questions:
- How you would market your membership site?
- What is the size of the pool of potential customers vs the number of competitors?
- How can I get noticed above my competitors?
- Is there a targeted sub-niche in the category that my membership site could better position itself?
If you can clearly answer these questions, you will get a clearer picture of what you could select as as a successful niche.
