How to Pick a Profitable Niche | #7

Having a niche and having a profitable niche are two very different things.

When trying to start a creative business, you need to be in a profitable niche. You can be doing all the right things in your portfolio, sales, and marketing, but if no one is willing to pay you, your business won't succeed.

Finding out what people are willing to pay for is hard. Market research takes a lot of time, but doing this crucial step in the beginning will be huge for your company.

This was my process, maybe this will help you.

I wanted to start a photography business and I was a very good landscape/cityscape photographer. A business needs money to succeed, so I looked up all the ways cityscape photographers make money... there weren't many. I could sell prints or I could license my photos to publications/companies. Option 1 wouldn't provide a living, and option 2 had fierce competition, especially for a newbie in the business. I started looking at other genres. One common theme I found was that I needed to provide a tangible return on investment for people buying my services if I wanted to make decent money. In came product photography/advertising. When a company spends $1,000 on an ad and makes $2,000, that's an ROI they can see. When someone buys a print or licenses a photo... there's no clear ROI.

My advice to you is to find the people with the money, figure out what their problems are, and then solve those problems with your creative business.