What Business Should My Online Business Be In?

Business is a combination of science and art, passion and logic, excitement and control. The trick to success lies in finding and maintaining the balance between these factors. This applies just as much to your choice of business as it does to any other part of it.
We have spoken before of the importance of passion in your choice. Without passion, running your business will feel like eating sand.
But on the same lines if the business is not built in a successful industry and one that will be successful for years to come, you will be building your online business on a foundation of sand.
What Industries will Create the Future?
So what industries should we be aiming at? What are the markets that are guaranteed to grow for the next 20 years? The talking heads on the internet seem to agree on more or less the following list, but remember, tomorrow is a another country, and the journey there is getting faster and stranger all the time, so no guarantees.
Having said that, there are some industries we can almost rely on. These include:
Health (from desperate ill-health to improving fitness and wellbeing)
Employment Services
IT (including hardware, software, design, manufacture, repair, installation, outsourcing, games, etc).
Financial Advice
Management, scientific and technical consulting services
Child day care service
Skilled technical services How can I Use This Information to Position my Internet Business?
Finding an appropriate niche for your small business is not always the easiest of activities. A quick glance at the list above might leave you with the feeling that all of these are 'big industry' subjects, so how can a small home business running on the internet possibly find a place in any of them? The thing to remember is that your niche can be tiny, but because you can potentially reach so many people, it can still attract enough customers to create a very successful internet business.
So how do you go about finding your niche?
Play the Generational Game
A key tool of professional marketer is what they call 'segmentation'. This tool involves breaking their market into groups (like cutting a pie into slices of various sizes). The groups are chosen according to certain factors everyone in the group has in common.