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Running a home-based business on the Internet means having the luxury of selling your products to a global marketplace − a potential customer base of only about six-billion people. Now, I understand that unless you own Microsoft, marketing to six-billion people can be unimaginable. That's why it's all the more important to go niche.

Niche marketing is a strategy that marries a particular product to the specific tastes of a specific target market, preferably a passionate and hot market. It is not a product that caters to the general population, but rather, you segment the population according to tastes and passion.

Take for example the pet industry. Pet lovers are considered a hot market as they are known to spend any kind of money to get the best for their pets. You can segment these pet lovers into dog lovers, cat lovers, parrot lovers, etc. But, you can drill these down further into pet insurance for dog lovers or pet insurance for cat lovers. This is what you call a niche. Don't discount niches just because the numbers involved are too small. In fact, this works to your advantage as, more than likely, the market is not dominated by bigger players, giving you the opportunity to dominate the niche yourself.

You don't even have to create the products for these niches if you aren't passionate about them. There are products already being sold in the most boring of niches, ready for someone to market them as an affiliate. Pet insurance, printer cartridges, nutritional supplements − these are not topics worth getting passionate and excited about, but the reality is that these are hot niches. It shouldn't be overlooked just because you're not passionate about it.

Alternatively, there are numerous membership sites offering articles and ebooks with private label rights. These private label articles or ebooks are written for a wide variety of niches, giving you full license to publish them with your name as the author.

Niches are all around you. Flip through a magazine, listen to conversations with friends, or just watch some TV and you're bound to chance upon an idea or two. As a home-based entrepreneur, paying attention to trends and gaps is a habit worth its weight in gold.

Nothing should stop you from creating a killer product if it doesn't already exist for a niche. Because the barriers of entry are so low on the Internet, the costs of making mistakes are extremely minimal. But once you hit the jackpot with a niche, only you can hold yourself back from dominating it.