When choosing a niche to exploit it’s best to pick something you have a personal interest in, that way you instinctively know what would appeal to your customers – because you’re one!

I earned a good living for 30 years out of my interest in real ale. I organised coach holidays to beer festivals in Belgium, Holland and Germany. However Tour Operations need staff, and this is a responsibility I no longer want. There are better products and markets that require only one employee – yourself!

My brother has sold ice cream around the streets of Leamington Spa since the age of 10, and he’s 52 now, so that’s a good few years. Tony has always produced his own adverts for his ice cream van, printing photos onto sticky-back plastic that can be attached to the windows or van sides.
He started developing a web-site to offer these stickers to other purveyors of ice-cream. During development, the site accidently went ‘live’, and within 3 days he had received an order from a google search!

That sale was achieved without any promotion whatsoever, and clearly demonstrates  the opportunities available if you identify a tight enough niche. Anyone searching for ice cream stickers will now find Tony’s website, and thanks to the internet he could end up with orders from all over the world!

Ice cream stickers are a perfect product for internet marketing. They can be printed at home, and produced only when payment has been confirmed by Paypal, so no bad debts. They are also thin and light, making them cheap and easy to post.

Profitable niche markets are all around us, you just have to look carefully for them.

John McNally