Three simple rules for choosing a market for your business - plus a list of 20 markets to think about starting a business in - Mothers Who Work: Tips, Advice on Work, Starting A Spare-Time Business, Family and Wellbeing

We often get asked by women who want to start making money online how to start, and one of the areas they often don’t consider is how they should go about choosing a market, sector or niche for business.

We’ll be providing you a list of markets to consider a little later in this article, but before that, a good starting point for choosing a market are these three simple criteria:

1. Look for a sector where people are used to spending money

If you want to make money online, you need to target a category fo people who are used to spending money on products or services – the more the better. Students, for example, are not the best area of interest because they have little money (unless you’re launching a rave, alcohol or something along those lines). Golfers, on the other hand, spend a lot of money buying the right kit, balls, clothes…and would happily try a new product to beat their opponent.

2. Look for flexibility in the product offering

Being able to sell different types of products to your market will make it even easier to make money because you can cross sell and upsell other products and add to your portfolio. So, limiting your service to botox injections, for example, means there isn’t much room to upsell, but if your offering is cosmetic treatments, there are many opportunities in there you can tap into.

3. If you like it, it makes the work a lot easier

While this isn’t the be all and end all, if you don’t like the product or services you plan to provide, it will start to show – and will become burdensome when you’re not hitting your financial target.

If you have a personal interest, experience or knowledge of a particular target audience, it will give you an advantage and you’ll enjoy reading up on what’s going on in that market, new developments etc, so you can stay on top of the game.

Here are some markets you could look into providing products and/or services in (in alphabetical order):