What defines a niche?

[Abbid]

Just a thought that popped into my head while reading up on SEO.

I was looking at keywords for my business and searched for a few commons terms that are related to my business and a few programs (namely overture) showed that my perticualar term had about 40 searches a day wheres as other terms were in the thousands.

So, it got me things, do i have a niche product? What exactly defines a niche?
Is it that no one else is doing it, or there a small specialised market for it?

Any thoughts?

 

[Moneyman]

a small percentage ie non mainstream or at least specialising in one aspect.
You are far more likely to sell beds if you are beds r us or whatever rather than furniture world's bed department.

 

[Ashley_Price]

I don't necessarily agree that a niche market means small. Our sister business - APA Secretarial - has a "niche" market of typing for researchers at universities - and there can be hundreds at one uni., yet few other typing firms seem to specialise in this area.

 

[jimbo1974]

Yeah I would define it as a specialised or specific market rather than a small one.
Carrying on the bed theme I would say a niche would be 'orthopaedic beds' or 'groovy water beds' (!) or something like that

 

Small supply ,big demand.

Earl

 

[Tim R-T-C]

A niche product would be one that is only useful to a very specific group of customers and of no use to anyone else. The real sizes of the markets are irrelevant.

Firms selling Manchester Utd. football memorabilia serve a niche market - it just happens to be huge.

 

[bwb]

Plus the benefit of the internet is that what used to be some very small and uneconomical viable niche markets are now huge mega markets but still niche... like if you sell scrab book materials, online that has a huge amount of customers, but if you were in a small city you would have very little business.