Before I point out the so-not obvious dropshipping niche mistakes dummies made, I just want to engage your mind a bit, shall I?
Have you watched “The Wizard of Oz”? If not, it’s a timeless 20th century Hollywood classic leaving a trail of fascination across generations, and on YouTube, it’s a blockbuster with millions of views.
The classic was a fairy tale with charming characters and excellent dialogues. The dialogue is explicitly a game-changer.
In existence is a part that reads like “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road leads there.” You also need to know how to find the right niche when starting a dropshipping business
Of course, the lesson here being not unless you have clear goals and focus on well-defined objectives, you’re bound to nowhere.
The experience resonates so well in niche Dropshipping, clear path, and defined objectives are the hallmarks of going niche.
If your Dropshipping store targets no particular niche, it means you’re targeting everyone.
And targeting everyone, I’m sorry to break it; you’ll only end up hitting no one.
Your cup of tea or not, to succeed in Dropshipping business, you’ve got to target a well-defined niche and harness strategies customized along with your target audience’s needs, and that form the basis of this post.
Choosing the right niche is crucial in Dropshipping.
Fortunately, it’s not as hard as you’d imagine.
So many rookies read ‘guru expert’ about choosing a Dropshipping niche and suddenly orient their thinking of cheap, one-page niche Shopify store once prevalent a couple of years back until online customers became bored and refused to convert.
Consequently, the newbies wind-up without even the basic grasp of Dropshipping and make blatant mistakes in choosing the niche for their store-and, of course, they won’t make money.
This post is about avoiding the glaring mistakes and do the right thing, so read on.
Why it’s silly to evaluate niches from the perspective of commercials.
The first mistake in niche selection is killing Dropshipping before it even starts.
What should you consider? Profit or Passion-This might shock you?
Dominating niche selection and profit over the long term.
Dropshipping niche Niche for Your Dropshipping Store
1.Wrong Ideas (or Having No Idea) What a Niche Is
Niche Dropshipping is not so much a convoluted idea as many people make it look so.
There’re so many preconceived-mostly mistaken ideas about a niche, and so many people incline to premise their strategies on these faulty assumptions.
Simply, a niche is a particular topic or a group of jointly related issues that people have interest in and spend money on.
And if you forced my hand to define a niche in terms of Dropshipping, I’d say something along the lines of “A niche is a group of similar people with shared interests, passion and problems” There you go, that was simple, right?
For instance, for a store, Survival is a broad topic whose meaning could be anything from camping, hiking, snowing, or hiking.
When you create your store, it’s possible to niche down to one niche, say camping.
But even camping in itself isn’t narrow given it encompasses hundreds of products from camping tents, camping stores, camping gears and beyond.
You can further narrow it to Camping tents; now, the topic is much more specific-which is selling campings tents, and it focuses on a specific person ( camper).
For illustration purposes from time to time, I may use examples from the dropshipping world as it provides lots of angles owing to its industry’s size-so HUGE.
To stand apart, you’ve got to focus on a narrower niche within the Dropshipping industry.
A seven-figure digital company for law firms in the shape of Rankings.io fits this example perfectly.
Rankins.io exclusively concentrates on law firms and practitioners in the US only, and thus they’re experts worth their salt in this arena. It has dozens of articles, all exclusively focusing on SEO and digital marketing for law firms.
Another classic example is the Pro Church Tools; it enables churches in the US to connect online with members via digital marketing; it has a dozen of articles offering various tips and tools to acquire, retain and engage members.
PumberSEO provides advice and strategies exclusively to plumbers who seek to generate more clients through Google search, it doesn’t get more specific and niche down than that, does it?
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All of the sites in the examples given constitute part of Making money online, and you’d notice they don’t target everyone and anyone their businesses get specific about the target audience to attract, which grants them the edge and make them “niche.”
So, toss any confusion about Dropshipping niches and get a hang that it’s a site with Dropshipping strategy laser-focused on a specific audience with a set of problems.
2.Selecting a Niche Based on Products, not Problems
A product ISN’T a niche. And Dropshipping stores based on products are not niched sites. Heck, it’s not like you can get a range of say drone cameras from AliExpress, then proceed to create a website on them and call it a niche site.
It may get you a few hundred bucks but not sustainable because the products get obsolete, and people move on. But what remains constant is the need behind the products.
And that’s why successful Dropshippers build their stores around needs, problems, and not products.
Richard Branson’s quote aptly captures it.
As does the quote by Robert Kiyosaki author Rich Dad Poor Dad.
The point I’m trying to hammer, and I do not wish to belabor on here is this, find a need or a problem that people desperately want a solution.
Then proceed to create a niche around the need, share content that provides the answer, and promote products that solve the problem.
When you focus on the problem and not a product, you tend to have more head-room to create useful and problem-solving content, and you’ll see ideas from different angles.
Think of reasons why folks buy juicers, who buy them, then proceed to create a niche store around the need and target audience-e.g. busy professionals seeking to eat healthy with no time to cook or fitness enthusiasts looking to juice on the go.
And that reminds me of another common rookie mistake in selecting a niche. Let’s look at the next point; stay with me.
3.Getting Profit vs. Passion Balance Wrong
Is it a niche of more money-making opportunities or a niche you’re passionate about? Which is it going to be? It’s one hot debate in Dropshipping, and successful Dropshippers have one answer: follow your passion.
However, passion is a strong word and, therefore, can be misleading.
To succeed, you don’t have to be crazy about a niche.
Of importance is to pick a niche of interest that you’re knowledgeable about.
It ought to be something that doesn’t pique your benefit since you’re in it for the whole hog.
It ought not misconstrued to mean completely ignoring the profit potential of a niche and only concentrate on your passion.
In case the niche you’re passionate about has few products to promote, or it’s what folks are still reluctant to buy online, regardless of the knowledge-rich content you create on that store, you’re bound to have a hard time making money.
And therefore, there’s a need to strike a balance between a niche matching your passion and simultaneously provide opportunities to make money.
Most beginners are prone to shiny objects; money is mostly their sole consideration in picking a niche.
And since they’ve limited knowledge of the niche, problems, and needs of the target audience, they wind up creating useless, vague, and thin Products or niche offering zero value to their prospects.
Consequently, they fail to generate money from the Dropshipping niche.
4.Modeling Your Niche Along Aliexpress-Shopify Dropshipping
One would think I’m against Aliexpress Products, nooo…far from it. Honestly speaking, I consider it to be among the best options for dropshipping business; what I’d never push for, however, is making Aliexpress the core of selecting niche or finding your winner; most rookies commit that dreadful mistake.
Newbies don’t think long term to enable them to create an authority Dropshipping store capable of employing monetization strategies and getting the products from other sources apart from Aliexpress or Chinese suppliers.
Instead, they create dropshipping stores relying only on Aiexpress or Chinese suppliers. Fatal mistake!
Experts like Otis of the ecomwizard, a man behind theecomwizard, offer profound insights. Also, he has a string of successful niche sites.
His success arose from basing niche choices on problems/needs.
As a newbie, let me burst your bubble, dropshipping with Aliexpress is the last thing you want to do even though its most people starting point.
Other than limiting your site’s long-term growth, you get looped into a frame of mind where you perpetually think of promoting products with long delivery dates, poor designs at times products not as described on the site instead of concentrating on your prospects and product quality.
Look at Aliexpress as a sourcing method, not a business model.
There are great examples of successful dropshipping niche, Shopify stores minting millions of bucks in dropshipping business, but they’re all based on well-defined problems and needs.
To start a successful Dropshipping niche store, first, drop Aliexpress obsession, then expand your horizon to conceptualize a niche based on the needs of a select segment of people and try source products from other reliable sources.
Then evaluate the niche’s profit potential, after which you can choose the type of Shopify models such as print on demand, genera store, niche store, or one product store.
If you have difficulty estimating the amount you can get from a niche, then chill; the next point will expound on that.
5.Not Researching the Profit Potential of a Niche Before Fully Committing.
I’ve alluded herein already that a niche has to align to interests, and it shouldn’t pique you as well. That said, it’s crucial to analyze the earning potential and the probable profit-making opportunities in a niche before fully committing.
You’re in this niche business to make money, that’s the bottom line, right?
And if there’re limited avenues to make money in your niche, even thousands of visitors hitting your Dropshipping store count for nothing.
So, let me use you as an example. You operate a store that is a very narrow and highly focused niche concerning certain face scrubbing products.
Your Dropshipping store traffic spike exponentially. At peak, you’d have as many as 8,000 visits simultaneously in real-time traffic.
But how much does the store make again?
A couple of hundred bucks a year.
Why?
It’s because a narrow niche has a great scarcity of products you can promote to your visitors. Besides, given the nature of the target audience, they may use the product occasionally.
In the end, all that’s left are a few hundred bucks you make from Facebook Ads.
Several top Dropshippers have shared about their niche stores that had good traffic but couldn’t convert owing to the limited earning potential. And therefore, before you enter a niche, research profit potential.
Consider the following before entering a niche:
Search Google for other dropshipping stores in the same niche, check for traffic, and comment on the content.
You can also see the stores earning using niche scraper. It will pull up their best sellers, recently added products to the store, and their monthly sales.
Run Google searches for your niche keywords and finds out if there’re paid search results-ads in the results. When you see folks spending on ads to promote a service or product niche, often that’s a strong signal there’s money.
Go to Amazon and check for relevant products with tons of reviews; ordinarily, that signify a niche’s profit potential. Take a look at the average review stats, and more review equals a higher level of interest among buyers, an indication that there’s money here.
The existence of lots of products relating to the niche selling on Dropshipping stores and eCommerce platforms is a testament to the money-making potential of the niche.
To join the money-making niche club, devise better content angles that mean outsmart your competition content-wise.
And that takes us to the next point which perhaps, in my opinion, is the most dreadful mistake made by newbies in choosing a niche.
6.Easy, Unsaturated Droshpping Niche That Has Zero Hard Work.
Is there a niche that requires zero hard work?
I can’t believe that question even exists. I mean where, on planet earth under the sun? Heck, no.
Ok, in existence are niches you’d say need less elbow grease but there’ none that can rank a store without hard work.
Even if you carve out a unique edge for an established niche, it won’t last long before your competition overthrows you.
The way to consistently remain on top and rake in a regular, reliable, and sustainable profit from Dropshipping is to provide significant value and craft exponentially superior product pages than your competition.
If you can religiously do that with reverence to hygoshop as the best examples, in the most saturated and competitive niches conceivable, you’ll dominate.
Among the most saturated niche on the web includes Fashion, Jewelry, Pets, etc.
Yet individuals like Inspireuplift with a few dozen products manage to pull-off one of the best dropshipping stores in the world.
How is that possible?
The founder, to achieve the fit, had to add unique products that are ten-fold more useful and presentable than his competition.
Products get organic sales and dominate the ranking for the most competitive keywords since he ran both Facebook ads, google ads, and other advertisement platforms.
The crystal ball here is this, if you don’t churn out suffice value for your prospects, you’re not ready to roll up your sleeves to work hard, and you have no growth plan, you won’t remain on top even in the easiest of niche.
Not sure what a business growth plan is? Just chill, and the next point has you covered.
Not Having a Growth Plan for Your Dropshipping.
How far forward do you think while selecting a niche for your Dropshipping?
Six months? A year? Five years?
If you’re most beginners, forward-looking and prospects of your business are the last thoughts you’d have.
Most select niche based on impulsive decisions triggered by the success story of some random stores or a gut feeling that you’d mint money in a dropshipping business.
Often there’s no plan- a perfect recipe for the saying failing to plan is planning to fail.
For the growth plan of your niche site, consider the following:
How long do you intend to work in the niche?
Is it in your interest?
And are you knowledgeable-about?
Is the niche seasonal, or it’s evergreen?
Are there successful Shopify stores in the niche, what are their traffic sources, and how do they make their money?
Are you ready to create a significantly more valuable and useful niche for your segment audience?
What are your niche’s broad Products and questions that you can split-up into individual articles and blog posts for your store blog section?
Is it possible to create a quarterly and semi-annually for your niche?
What’s the niche’s best-performing product, and do you have what it takes to create the store and convert?
Does the niche have sufficient interest and head-room for growth?
What constitutes your primary traffic sources, and how do you intend to grow them or make sales?
Does the niche have regular engagement possibilities?
Is it challenging to get conversions to the niche, and if so, how hard?
Is it possible to build a community around the niche and doe folks like discussing things?
What’s the game? For instance, are you building a passive income engine to act as launch-pad for future projects, or you are making the site to sell on Flippa in a few years?
Are you still here? Good!
It’s a tall order for the complete Rockies to have a perfect plan for growing a Dropshipping niche store.
But you ought to think ahead while selecting a niche to avoid wasting time and resources.
If you’ve planned and you’ve asked a self-hard question, you assume a better position to decide whether to choose a niche or not.
Evaluating a Niche Based on Google Search Traffic Alone
For most niche stores, Google Search, without a doubt, is the most significant traffic source.
But is it the sole source to use in selecting a dropshipping niche? Research seems to suggest otherwise.
Only 31.8% of products get found via a search engine. The rest of the traffic emanates from direct sources, email lists, referrals, and social media networks like Facebook ads.
That’s according to a joint study by Statista and Parse.ly-a leading analytics platforms monitoring millions of stores with billions of combined visitors.
A niche’s lack of tons of traffic on its top search queries or if SERPS are highly competitive does not mean it’s useless.
There’s plenty of successful niches not dependent on Google search, and therefore, the sooner you toss that unhealthy obsessing with Google Search traffic, the better.
Search traffic is crucial, and essential is the evaluation of the niche from a community perspective.
Assess if it’s possible to grow a thriving email list, forum, or a Facebook Group in that niche. Check for instances where other Dropshippers in the niche have built online communities.
Usually, the conversion rate of traffic originating from a dedicated Facebook Page or email list register higher stats than search traffic. And this’s why it’s foolhardy to write off a niche owing to its low search volume.
Thinking You Need To Be World’s Expert To Succeed.
This point may have come at this tail end, but sure it’s among the top mistakes that hinder newbies from nailing down profitable niches.
Undoubtedly to succeed in a niche, you must be knowledgeable in it but not the world’s leading expert. However, a relative expert you can be on top should you possess more knowledge than your target audience.
Close to 47% of the global population doesn’t have internet access, that’s according to a study by We Are Social and Hootsuite.
Hypothetically let’s work that all the other internet users have more profound knowledge on a particular niche than you-impossible, of course.
The fact is, every day, there’re millions of people getting online for the first time, and they’re green on that niche.
To them, you’re an expert.
For instance, assuming you’ve heard the term dropshipping for the first time, spent a couple of hours learning about it; you’re sure more adept about it than folks who don’t know what’s dropshipping?.
Ok, you can teach an intermediate learner or dropshipping expert; however, to a brand rockie, the knowledge in your possession is useful to them.
The example is on the extreme, right? I know, however, your place as a niche expert is subject to who target.
The author of Four Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris quips that one becomes adept on a topic than 95% of the average folks if they just read three different on the same issue.
And to join a niche, you don’t have to know everything about it to be sufficiently knowledgeable, Just know more than your target segment.
Don’t abandon a niche just because you’re not the ultimate expert. Armed with basic knowledge on a niche, only conduct a bit of research to improve.
Even as you incrementally improve your knowledge, you can still make money and build a successful Dropshipping niche site targeting folks who don’t know as much as you do about the product.
Choosing a niche for your Dropshipping is a critical definitive first step that defines your success or failure. However, it’s not so much of rocket science as most newbies think.
Just avoid the usual pitfalls highlighted herein and concentrate on selecting a niche to provide value for your prospects regularly.
Do that, and you’ll have no reason not to succeed in the niche you pick.
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