How To Find Your Niche Market: Pick a Million Dollar Niche With This 1,000 Year Old Japanese Technique

In the quest for digital dominance, traditional advice on picking your niche market often falls short, guiding many aspiring entrepreneurs and content creators down a path that's both crowded and misaligned with their true passions and skills.

Conventional wisdom suggests analyzing market gaps, evaluating profitability, and tailoring content to specific SEO keywords. While these steps are foundational, they miss a crucial element that can transform your approach from merely functional to deeply fulfilling and uniquely competitive: the Japanese concept of Ikigai.

Traditional niche market selection focuses heavily on external factors, such as market demand, competition levels, and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. It emphasizes finding a unique value proposition, analyzing niche market potential, and developing content marketing strategies that adhere to SEO best practices.

However, this approach often overlooks the internal drivers that sustain motivation and innovation, leading to a disconnect between what you do and what you love.

Ikigai, a Japanese philosophy that means “a reason for being,” offers a more holistic approach to identifying your niche market.

It lies at the intersection of four fundamental questions:

What do you love?

What are you good at?

What can you be paid for?

And what does the world need?

By exploring these dimensions, you can uncover a niche that not only promises profitability and meets market needs but also aligns with your passions and skills, ensuring long-term satisfaction and success.

Applying Ikigai to Niche Market Selection

1. What You Love (Passion): Start by identifying topics that ignite your passion. This ensures your work remains enjoyable and fulfilling, driving you to produce high-quality, engaging content that resonates with your audience.
2. What You Are Good At (Vocation): Evaluate your skills and strengths. A niche that leverages your existing competencies will allow you to create superior offerings and establish yourself as an authority.
3. What You Can Be Paid For (Profession): Market research techniques and keyword research for niche markets come into play here. Analyzing customer needs, gaps in the market, and competitive analysis will help you identify profitable niches that can sustain a business.
4. What The World Needs (Mission): This involves looking beyond individual desires to understand broader market trends and societal needs. Sustainable niche marketing practices and developing products or services that offer solutions to pressing problems can help you carve out a meaningful and demanded niche.

Which is the dream, right?!

Don’t we all want to make money doing what we love?

So – how can we apply this Japanese philosophy to finding your niche market?

How can we help you find your business ikigai?

The most profitable business niches tailored to who you are.

When your niche aligns with the 4 elements of ikigai, you gain purpose, prosperity and career satisfaction.

So ikigai gives you a strategic model to uncover money-making niche ideas that also fulfill you as a person.

To figure out which niche market to go into, we’re going to stop by each of the 4 ikigai circles, starting with what you’re good at doing.

 

CIRCLE 1: WHAT YOU’RE GOOD AT

We’re all good at something.

Maybe you’re a great designer. Or you’re good at writing, or playing the piano.

There’s all kinds of things you could be good at.

And sometimes, you might not even realize you’re good at them. Sometimes people might tell you you’re really good at something when you never even thought of it before.

For this circle, write down at least 10 things that you are good at.

If you can’t think of anything, ask yourself these questions:

“What do people say you’re good at?”

“What things do you look back on and say “I’m proud of that?””

So write down a list of everything you know for a fact you’re good at. It can be skills or games or projects or things you’ve done in the past.

 

CIRCLE 2: WHAT YOU ENJOY DOING

What do you love doing?

You could figure that out by asking yourself these questions:

1 – “What could you talk about non-stop for an hour?”

2- “If you had an entirely free day with no obligations, how would you choose to spend it? What activities sound enjoyable?”

3- “If you won the lottery tomorrow and money wasn’t an issue, what would your dream job be?”

Think about it and write down 10 things you love doing.

 

CIRCLE 3: WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS

Now, write down 10 things that the world is looking for.

The most profitable businesses work because they solve problems people want solved.

So – what’s causing people problems?

You can use tools like Answer The Public to find out what questions people are asking – and then answer those questions with your business!

 

CIRCLE 4: WHAT CAN YOU GET PAID FOR

Now you need to figure out what you can get paid for.

The truth is, money flows towards attention, so if you can get people’s attention, you can get paid.

One way to tell what people are paying attention to is with keyword tools, like Mangools.

Look around, see which search terms are grabbing people’s attention.

The higher the search volume, the more this topic has people’s attention.

After doing some research, write down at least 10 things you can get paid money to do.

So after writing down your answers to each of the 4 ikigai circles, you should be looking for overlap.

This overlap will be a niche market that:

1 – You’re good at

2 – You love to do

3 – The world needs

4- Gets you paid

That overlap of these 4 concepts is the niche market you need to be in.

That’s IF you found your ikigai on the first try.

The truth is, finding your ikigai is a lifelong process of experimentation and research.

If you came out of this video without finding your ikigai – DON’T WORRY.

Most people regularly revisit these questions as they learn more about themselves and their market, fine-tuning and adapting their ikigai over time.

Make it a part of your planning this year to come back every few months and go through the exercises in this video all over again. You may have learned something new about yourself or your market that completely changes your ikigai.

 

Finding Your Ikigai With AI

I gave a live video demonstration on how you can use ChatGPT to help find the niche market for your next business.

You can see the prompts I use and the results I got when combining the concept of ikigai with ChatGPT.

Watch it here.