As for as a niche market, basically all it is a market within a market unless you have specialized knowledge on a specific topic. And that is from a marketing point of view.

From an employee perspective a specialist would be counted as a niche, as they specialize in fixing an exact problem within a larger industry. Like an orthodontist in the dental industry.

From a traditional company’s perspective the supply of DVD discs was a niche at first. It was a highly specialized knowledge and only a few companies were solving the problem (supplying the blank discs). Now it is not a niche as there are so many companies offering the same service. Is also a good thing to understand what is a niche today may not be latter on down the track. Like the orthodontist, certain procedures that use to be in there domain of expertise are now common practice at most dental clinics.

 As far as online niches you must find a need that you are capable of filling, either as information as in an E-book, or a time management or functionality issue as far as doing things with a computer, then it would be software that addresses and solves as many of those issues as possible. With updates to your program as you create them to address further issues in order to retain the customers that you have as well as making your product more desirable to those looking to solve the problems that they have which your product solves. Both of these examples are digital...

Physical products and the internet are very similar. You are still trying to solve or meet the prospective customer’s needs as well as answer their questions while relieving their fears. For an example of meeting their needs, say you had a store selling ladies clothing. To simply put pictures of the individual items you sell with a price below each picture would not be the most effective way to do it as it does not address any of their questions apart from the price, in fact it would raise more questions than it answered. A better way would be to have a picture of the item with a caption below saying click here for more details, and of course your caption would be a hypertext link to a product page for that item with possibly the following details; Material, sizes available, colors available, cleaning instructions, smaller pictures in the background of similar products in case the potential customer had doubts, also on the page would be the price of the item and details on your refund policy as well as the cost of shipping and a guarantee of when the item will be arriving after the purchase. This is just a very basic way of meeting their needs in respect of answering their questions. As far as relieving some of their fears the money back guarantee as well as secure checkout and customer privacy all go towards solving these issues. It is also important to note that if you can do the above better than your competitors you will eventually get a share of their customers as well as keeping your own.

 Remember we are in the Information Technology age. So the better we are at providing either of those to others the better we will do. Two extreme companies which are addressing both of these issues successfully are; Google with its search engine algorithm which cuts out a larger proportion of the rubbish results, making the end users experience more practical in regards to finding what they are searching for thus making the experience more enjoyable. Another well know company which has done this is Microsoft by making an operating system allowing even the most basic of us the ability to use a computer.

Both of the above companies addressed both problems by providing an easy to use program that allows us to access Information via the Technology they have developed.