Welcome to MYN Guest Blogger, a new forum on Monetize Your Niche that features experts in their respective businesses with “a niche to blog about.”  I am pleased to introduce my friend and business associate Susan Friedmann, the NichePreneur® Coach, to launch this new forum.

If you have “a niche to blog about” and would like to be considered for publication in this forum, send your idea or actual blog to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .  [By submitting a potential blog post, you are granting me permission to publish it in this forum.  Edited versions will be sent back to you for prior approval.]

For great information on blogging --how to do it, how to profit from it -- check out our sister website at www.BloggingReporter.com.  See homepage link at bottom of right-hand column.

How to Find a Niche Trend

By Susan Friedmann

One of the most common questions I get from readers of my new book, Riches in Niches: How to Make it BIG in a small Market, especially those who have just worked through my GEL Formula for discovering their niche, relates to trends. “How do I know how to find a trend?” people ask. “Is there a way to tell what the next big thing is?”

Identifying trends isn’t some mysterious, archaic art. You don’t need divination tools or an inside track to tomorrow to tell which way the wind is blowing. Identifying trends has little to do with magic — and everything to do with paying attention.

For example, walk through the grocery store. This isn’t a remarkable exercise, for most people. Everyone has to eat, after all, and grocery stores are where they keep the food. However, how often do you really pay attention to the offerings on the shelves? Especially those offerings in a category you don’t buy — for example, barbeque sauce if you’re a vegetarian, or beer if you don’t drink? Probably not too often. Yet the grocery shelves can offer remarkable insight about cultural changes, buying habits and trends — if you pay attention.

Don’t believe me? Direct your cart — and your attention! — to the dog food aisle. Now, I don’t have a dog, but I’ve done extensive work with the pet industry. Walking down the aisle, I’m struck by the recent explosion of new pet food offerings. Dogs can dine on healthy kibbles or vitamin-enhanced soft foods. There are premium pet foods that cost as much as a good dinner at a restaurant and luxury foods that cost two times as much.

What does this tell us? First, that pets are incredibly important to their owners — they’re obviously willing and able to spend money on their canine companions. That’s one niche right there: pet lovers. From this point, you can narrow the target market even further. Pet foods that tout the health benefits of a product appeal to a different customer than pet foods that appeal by nature of being premium, high-end, luxury items. There’s the health-conscious pet loving market, and the status-seeking pet loving market. 

It’s possible to refine this market even more. There are vegetarian health-conscious pet lovers and meat-eating health-conscious pet lovers, who want to share their dietary preferences with their dogs.

I’ll stop, before you think I’ve gone completely around the bend here, but you see the point. Trends are all around us. Identifying them is as simple as paying attention to the world around you and thinking critically about what you see. That’s when you’ll see the opportunities — look long enough, and you’ll find the opportunity that’s right for you!  As we move in 2011, watch out for up and coming trends.

Susan Friedmann, CSP, The NichePreneur Coach, is a niche marketing expert who helps small business owners, entrepreneurs and service professionals, find and capitalize on a niche market. Author: "Riches in Niches: How to Make it BIG in a small Market," "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Target Marketing," and many other titles. For more great information on niche marketing strategies that work, and for a complementary copy of  "The NichePreneur Mindset: How to Find Your Niche to Success," visit http://www.richesinniches.com/invitation, and click to download your FREE report on niche marketing success..

We’ve come to the end of 2010.  A little over three weeks left and it’s history.  What kind of year has this been for you?  What “wins,” as Eric Lofholm calls them, have you tallied that can help launch or keep your momentum going into 2011?

I continued to grow my company and launched “Secrets to Monetizing Your Niche…,” a 3-CD series to help entrepreneurs, small business owners, and network marketers pursue their passion for profit as I am pursuing mine.  Its “sequel” is in the works.  My company name now bears a registered trademark ®, which is not only an asset, but also a step toward licensing my program model as a Business Opportunity for other individuals who aspire to be coaches.

Speaking of coaches, I accumulated SEVEN this year (OMG!) – not as many as the 20 Harvey Mackay admitted to in Success magazine – but each one serves an important role in helping me develop personally and professionally.  A heartfelt shout out goes to Jeffery Combs, Ted McGrath, Eric Lofholm, Arvee Robinson, Allen Kotlyar, Gary Tallison, and Loral Langemeier.

My coaching clients are doing the same thing!  They are challenging me to grow, to stretch, to bring my best to the table each time we meet.  It’s a symbiotic relationship of sorts, where we nourish each other intellectually and emotionally, and also, shouldn’t I be expected to “walk my talk”?  This year I entered into several JVs based on collaboration and reciprocal marketing.  One example, the Nichepreneur Coach Susan Friedmann interviewed me for a joint podcast, and she will be a guest blogger for me.

Let’s talk about financial goals.  I didn’t hit mine.  Did you reach yours?  Many entrepreneurs and home-based business owners have been lied to and hyped into believing that this or that new business venture is their ticket to “financial freedom.”  There’s a whole industry that revolves around The Business Opportunity, grabbing one and riding into the sunset.  Of course it doesn’t work this way for 98% of the dreamers, but it’s still a dream worth having.  As Jim Rohn says, it’s not making a million dollars that’s important, but what it will make of you to attain it.

It sunk in this year that it’s OK, even necessary, to have REALISTIC goals.  Wow!  This was liberating for me rather than setting myself up for failure over and over.  What happened then to that goal of $100,000 per month?  It’s still there, but to get there things have to change – not in the environment or economy but on the inside.  That’s one fundamental Same Old Same Old that’s not going anywhere.  Throw out “fake it ‘till you make it,” be real, and develop the habits of a millionaire if that’s your goal.

“What’s your Cash Machine?”  This is the signature question of my financial coach Loral Langemeier.  What can you do TODAY, based on what you already know how to do or are good at, to earn income within 72 hours?  How refreshing is that!  We can spend our lives getting ready to get ready, building the company infrastructure, putting all our ducks in a row, end up in the poor house and wonder what happened.  I encourage you to begin your financial revival with her down-to-earth book, Put More Cash in Your Pocket: Turn What You Know into Dough.

As I dropped five bucks at Starbucks this morning, I remembered one of Loral’s key principles: Rather than scrimp and save your way out of financial challenges, downsizing your dreams and lifestyle, contracting your consciousness and inviting more scarcity, think with expanded and open creativity: “The best thing you can do when finances get tight is to focus on making more money.”

Driving home I noticed opportunity after opportunity for me to use what I already know, without developing additional innovative products, to make “new” money.  It IS out there.  To quote my mentor Jim Rohn again, lack of money is not the problem; the problem is lack of creativity, lack of resourcefulness, lack of ideas.  I’m not going to let the Same Old Same Old be that for me in 2011.  Don’t let that happen for you either!