When you have a niche, or business idea that you are excited about and want to pursue, or when you’ve got something up and running but business is slow, pull back for a short time and do a quick scan of your competitors in that niche.

This will give you a good look at whether your idea is specialized enough to stand out, or not. If you find that it isn’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have chosen a bad idea, or that the market is already flooded with people doing what you want to do, so you better find a new idea. Not at all. Remember all you have learned about your special uniqueness!

What this will help you to do is realize where you need to emphasize, develop, or dig deeper to REALLY set yourself apart from others, or where you need to speak more authentically to your ideal customer.

Kitchen Wisdom

Let’s take the Recipe Blog niche as an example. Been online lately? You’ll notice that the Internet is completely flooded with really great baking and cooking blogs. This niche is super-developed, with gorgeous photos, original artwork, cohesive branding, cookbooks for sale, you name it. Sounds like a bad niche to pick doesn’t it? Even if you love cooking more than anything.

But wait! Look for the opportunities, look for the holes in marketplace…

Let’s say you specialize in gluten-free baking – that’s a niche specialization isn’t it? Go search for gluten-free baking sites, research your competition, and you will find the same thing: Thousands of them. So dig further…

What about gluten-free and sugar-free? Ah now we’re talking! Sugar is used in abundance to make up for the browning and mouthfeel missing from gluten-free (GF) baking. Go ahead, try and find sites with great recipes for GF, sugar-free baking. Good luck. Because there are very few – and none that I’ve found with good recipes – good enough that my kids will eat them.

So now we have niched down within your field of interest to a sub-sub-category that is wide open and begging for inspiration and leadership! What if you became the expert on healthy, natural sugar substitutes like stevia, xylitol (from hardwood trees, not GMO corn), lo han guo (Chinese fruit extract) and Thaumatin (extracted from African Ketemfe berries). AND you become one of the few places where customers can purchase these sweeteners?

Or, what if you realize that everyone features printed recipes and photos. So you decide to stand out by shooting a video for every recipe. Maybe you wear kooky outfits, or maybe you love haute couture, so you dress to the nines – you choose a visual persona that encapsulates YOU. And that becomes yet another way to stand out.

Maybe you’re a guy and you talk about photography while you’re cooking. Maybe you tell jokes, or goof around, or swear a lot. There are hundreds of ways to differentiate yourself! Just make sure you are pulling out or emphasizing an authentic part of you, not acting.

Maybe you take it one step further and you go gluten-free, sugar-free and grain-free… Now you are hitting the paleo diet market, the digestive disease market and the weight loss market. Maybe you become the place to go for supplies and you come up with a killer grain-free flour blend of potato flour, coconut flour, almond flour and cassava flour. Nobody else is selling this blend and as your recipes become popular, and word of your culinary prowess spreads, you decide to package up your blend and sell it on your website, and then on Amazon. And then into Whole Foods.

Okay, I’ll stop there! But you get my point: Finding out you have rigorous competition, or that your market is already flooded, doesn’t necessarily mean you have to find a new idea, or different niche to play in. It may just mean you have to dig deeper, specialize further, and become even more unique or different.

But you DO have to take a look at what’s happening in your chosen field. See what people are already doing, so you can figure out how to make yourself stand out.

Don’t put your head in the sand and invest hundreds of hours of work and wads of cash in a doomed enterprise, just because you are afraid to take an honest look around you. Knowledge is power and lemons can always be made into sugar-free lemonade!