A Niche can be very important in distinguishing your website from the billions of sites already on the world wide web. This article will focus on how to build a Successful Social Website with Niche Markets.
First, let’s define what a Niche is.
Merriam-Webster defines Niche as thus (note that we only took definition 2(a and d) as it applies to this article):
a : a place, employment, status, or activity for which a person or thing is best fitted <finally found her niche>
d : a specialized market
As you can see above, a Niche is basically a focus as opposed to being just a general site with no focus at all. Niches can be anything that you choose to focus on for your site – as item “d” above says – a specialized market.
Many people want to be just like Facebook©™. Frequently, our phpFox script is called a “Facebook clone script” because it has so many similar features that allow you to make a site similar to Facebook. Since it wouldn’t be good to copy Facebook, as your users are probably already on it and won’t see a reason to use another site exactly like it, a Niche is what you need.
Now that we know what a Niche is, we can focus on using a Niche for your website. “But, how do I find the best Niche,” you may ask. It’s a good idea to focus on things you have experience with, that way you can generate content for your niche and provide great information to engage your users.
Business/Professional Expertise
A great Niche can come from your work. Whatever profession you have experience in can also make a great idea for a social network for business professionals. Just look at LinkedIn for one example of a successful Niche type of site. LinkedIn is a “business-oriented social networking service” ~wikipedia. Its focus is on business and business contacts – professional networking. You can make a successful site based on your business experience and expertise.
Hobbies
Hobbies make a compelling social network idea as you get like-minded individuals sharing ideas, tips, etc. One Niche that comes to mind is Etsy, but that’s more for shopping for handmade items. However, since it does have a specific focus (niche), it’s a good example. Pinterest is another one, very popular Niche site for sharing ideas. You may ask how is Pinterest a Niche as it has so many different things in it. It started out focusing on ideas. Sharing ideas. That’s a type of a niche as it is focused on a particular topic that people are interested in. It has grown from that to be for all kinds of sharing, but, it started as a focus.
Perhaps you like painting, pottery, sports, RC cars, etc. There are so many hobbies that you should be able to find a hobby niche and make a great site with it.
Education
School alumni sites would be a good social network Niche site. You can find many popular college sport’s fan sites but there are other Niche sites you could make. Perhaps something for teachers, parents, homework help or tutoring, fraternities, etc.
From the above ideas, you should be able to find a great Niche, something that your site specializes in, that you can use to succeed with your website. Make sure it’s something you are interested in as you’ll want a lot of content to start your site.
Facebook started as a Niche site as one example of how successful a Niche can be. As this Wikipedia article shows, Facebook started as a Niche for college students. We all know how successful it became just from starting with that one focus, college students. As of the last statistics, it has about 1.65 billion users. Not bad for a small Niche start!
Chances are if you have a passion for something, someone else does too. Whether it’s the above-mentioned topics, or fetishes, phobias, causes or politics, etc., you can make a successful social network site from Niche Markets.
How would you do that? Well, the phpFox script has a lot of ways you can customize your site. For a niche, you might want to change the default phrases to match your niche. For example, let’s say you made a niche site for people that like medieval stuff.
- Site name: Medieval Marvels
- Menus: Marketplace changed to Shoppe
- Forum – Tavern
- Feed – Ye Town Crier
- Phrases changed from “you” to “ye”.
You get the idea. You would want to change things in the site to make the user feel that they are “in” that niche when on your site. Make them feel at home and make your site unique so that they keep coming back for more because they can’t get what you have on other sites.
You can make a very successful Niche site by putting a little effort into making it unique, focused, and with content to keep your users coming back. Adding content is critical to a site’s success. Write some blogs, forum topics, post photos, whatever you can do in order to keep users on the site. Once they are there, they tend to naturally want to contribute and so your site will grow from that. When they do contribute, encourage them more by posting comments or “liking” their posts. You’ll find that the more they are encouraged, the more they come back and also, they will invite their friends, family, etc and help grow your site.
As we mentioned above, Facebook started as a small niche focused just on one particular college and grew to a mega-huge success. If you take your passion, expertise, and creativity, you too can have a successful Niche site. It all starts with a dream! Get started on your dream today with phpFox social network script – the best social network platform.
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