The key to creating a successful business, whether you’re selling digital courses online or you’re starting a physical business that sells tangible products, is to determine whether people will buy from you or not BEFORE you invest your time and/or money.

The first step to doing this is to know your niche, or your market.

Your niche is the distinct segment of a market that categorizes your offers.

Usually, the niche of a business is directly related to the problem or challenges its prospects faces.

Online, there are 3 "Mega Niches" such as health and fitness, dating and relationships and the financial niche.

These have become mega niches because each stands for an irrational need which people are always looking to solve.

It’s actually pretty simple, the average person in our society usually feels unhappy when one of these needs is unfulfilled.

If you’re healthy and fit, with a great social life, but struggling financially, making more money is probably going to be your main focus.

If you’re wealthy and you have a pretty nice social life, but you’re obese, you’re going to focus on losing weight.

If you have no social life or haven’t found a partner, but both the other needs are fulfilled, you’ll probably start dating or set out to make some friends.

Most people simply feel a need to fulfill each of these 3 needs, that’s why a lot of successful businesses, online or offline, look to offer a solution to one of these needs since there will always be a demand to fulfill them!

Entrepreneurs know that people are almost always looking to strengthen one of these 3 parts of their lives, so they create solutions for people’s problems or help them overcome their challenges.

Now a lot of people have figured this out, that’s why if you were to search "fitness" or "dating" in a search engine, you’re going to find millions of results with only the most funded companies in the top 10 search results.

To avoid all this competition, you should have a sub-niche within these huge markets.

Niche domination is much easier when your niche is targeted on certain people looking to solve specific problems.

By sticking to one of the mega niches or markets, and offering a solution to a specific problem that you know people are looking to solve, you’re ultimate goal should be to have your offer be the first they’d find when searching for a solution.

If you’ve already have a product or service, I’d determine what exactly your niche is.

Then, I’d also determine why someone would buy your products, and ask yourself "What is the irrational need that my product fulfills? And what can I do to make it stand out from my competition?"

For example, if your sell dog training courses, I suggest you open up Google right now, and search something somewhat specific like "How to Train a Dog".

By analyzing the results and seeing if there are people offering dog training courses, you can get a good idea if there is a demand in that niche.

If you can’t seem to find much direct competition in your niche or there aren’t people searching specifically to solve the problem your product solves, it could mean that there really isn’t a substantial need to find a solution to this problem.

OR, if you know for a fact that people are looking to solve this need, and you’ve done your research and you know the traffic source is actually there, but no one has tapped into it, you just found yourself a great way to make money without having to work like a dog to beat your competition.

If you create a product BEFORE you’ve found a source of potential customers interested in buying, you’re risking your time because once your product is ready to sell, and you’re looking for a source of traffic, it’s possible that you’ll find that there aren’t much people really out there looking to do business with you.

This is mistake that thousands of marketers, who work online of offline, make each year.

By finding your niche, researching your market and knowing which problems people are looking to solve, you’re actually determining whether creating a solution is worth your time, and if there will actually be a return on investment for you.