There was a point in my life when I had four job offers in four different Asian cities and very little idea which one I should choose.
This was shortly after I had finished working in a factory in East London. I had taken the job because I wanted to save some money and move on to something different, and part of that money eventually paid for a CELTA course in Notting Hill.
Once I had completed the course, I started applying for teaching jobs overseas.
Before long, I had offers from Busan in South Korea, Bangkok in Thailand, Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and Nagoya in Japan.
All four sounded interesting for different reasons, although from a financial point of view Busan and Nagoya made the most sense. I hadn’t visited either city, so I wasn’t choosing based on some deep understanding of what it would actually be like to live there.
Nagoya did have one small thing in its favour though.
I already knew the name.
Gary Lineker helped put Nagoya on my radar
I’ve been a football fan for most of my life, and I’m a Leyton Orient supporter.
Gary Lineker obviously had nothing to do with Leyton Orient, but he was one of the best-known English footballers of his generation. Towards the end of his playing career, he moved to Japan and signed for Nagoya Grampus Eight.
At the time, that stood out.
British players weren’t routinely moving to Japan, so I remembered the club and, more importantly, I remembered Nagoya.
That meant when the job offers arrived, Nagoya wasn’t simply another unfamiliar city on a list. I already had some kind of connection with the name, even if it was a small one.
It certainly wasn’t the only reason I chose it. The job itself made financial sense, and Busan was the other serious option, but that football connection helped tip things in Nagoya’s favour.
I didn’t have a spreadsheet comparing every aspect of life in each city, and I hadn’t spent weeks trying to predict every possible outcome.
I had enough information to make a reasonable choice, Nagoya had a small personal pull, and I accepted the job.
Then I looked at what the guidebook had to say.
The guidebook wasn’t exactly enthusiastic
The opening message was essentially that most visitors didn’t stick around for very long because there wasn’t much to do.
Nagoya Castle got a mention. So did Osu Kannon Temple. But the overall impression was clear enough.
If you were travelling around Japan, you’d probably have a more interesting time in Tokyo or Kyoto.
Fortunately, I had already accepted the job.
Had I been choosing a holiday destination purely from that guidebook, I doubt Nagoya would have made the shortlist.
When I eventually arrived, I could understand why somebody writing for tourists might have described it that way.
My first impression wasn’t of temples, wooden streets and the traditional Japan people often imagine before they actually come here.
Nagoya looked like a concrete jungle.
There was plenty of traffic, a lot of fairly unattractive buildings and not much that immediately shouted out as something you would put on the front of a Japan travel brochure.
I had travelled up from the Osaka area with a few other people who were also heading to Nagoya. None of us really knew each other yet.
When we arrived, we met the manager of the company we were going to work for, and he took us by taxi to our apartments one by one.
I don’t remember having some dramatic reaction to the city when I first saw it. It simply felt unfamiliar.
That was enough.
Everything seemed safe. Everything worked. Normal everyday things were suddenly interesting because I hadn’t done them before.
Going to the supermarket was interesting. Getting around the city was interesting. Teaching was interesting.
Even fairly mundane parts of daily life felt new because I was experiencing them in a country I’d never lived in before.
I never regretted choosing Nagoya
I enjoyed the teaching and I enjoyed the adventure of living somewhere completely different.
Over time, the novelty obviously wore off. Going to the supermarket eventually became what going to the supermarket is anywhere else.
But by then, life had started to take over.
I made friends, settled into the city and later met my wife.
Nagoya gradually stopped feeling like somewhere I’d chosen from a list of four job offers and started feeling like home.
And strangely enough, Nagoya Grampus, the football club that had helped put the city into my head in the first place, now plays about ten minutes’ walk from my house.
I have never looked back and thought I should have chosen Busan instead.
That doesn’t mean Busan would have been a bad decision. I might have loved it there too.
The important part is that I had enough information to make a sensible choice, combined with a reason that made Nagoya feel slightly more connected to me personally.
Then I actually lived the decision.
Only after that did I discover whether it worked.
Research can tell you a lot, but it can’t tell you everything
That is where I think choosing a niche becomes very similar.
When people start thinking about building an online business, one of the first questions they often ask is which niche they should choose.
Then they start looking outside themselves for the answer.
They search for profitable niches, trending niches, low-competition niches and lists of markets that somebody else believes have potential.
Researching a market isn’t a bad thing. I think you should know whether people are interested in the subject, whether they spend money and whether there are problems you can realistically help them solve.
But research has limits.
My guidebook could tell me that Nagoya wasn’t particularly exciting for tourists.
It couldn’t tell me whether I would enjoy living there.
It couldn’t tell me whether I would like teaching, who I would meet, whether I would build a life there or whether I would still be living in the same city decades later.
Market research works in much the same way.
It can tell you about demand, competition, products and buying behaviour.
It cannot tell you whether you are actually a good fit for serving the people inside that market.
A niche is more than a topic
One of the biggest mistakes I see is treating a niche as though it is simply a subject.
Someone says their niche is fitness, digital marketing, personal development or travel.
Those are broad topics.
They tell me almost nothing about the people that person actually wants to help.
If I say I work in digital marketing, I could be talking to somebody who has never earned a penny online, somebody who already has a small business and needs more traffic, somebody building an email list, a local business owner trying to get leads, or an affiliate marketer trying to make their first commission.
Those people may all have an interest in digital marketing, but they do not have the same problems or the same goals.
That is why niche selection becomes much easier when you stop thinking only about the subject and start thinking about the people.
I start with who I can genuinely help
The question I find far more useful is who I can realistically help.
That answer can come from all sorts of places.
It might come from something you’ve done professionally for years. It could come from a hobby you’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time learning about, a problem you’ve solved yourself, results you’ve achieved, unusual experiences you’ve had or knowledge you’ve accumulated without really noticing how much you know.
For example, I’ve spent decades living in Japan and travelling around the country. That gives me a very different basis for creating Japan travel content than somebody who has visited once and decided to start a travel site because the niche looks profitable.
The same applies to the businesses I’ve built around white label content, email marketing, traffic generation and video marketing. I didn’t pick those subjects because a list told me they were hot. I built around things I had actually done, understood and could help other people with.
You don’t necessarily need to be the leading expert in the world.
You do need a reason for somebody to pay attention to you.
If I’ve never built an online business, never created a product, never generated traffic and never built an email list, then teaching people how to build a successful online business is going to be difficult.
I would mostly be repeating things I’ve learned from other people.
On the other hand, there may be something else I know extremely well that feels ordinary to me simply because I’ve been doing it for years.
That can be a much better starting point.
The niche also has to make sense commercially
This is where I think both extremes cause problems.
One extreme says picking a niche simply means follow your passion.
The other tells you to forget what you care about and go wherever the money is.
I don’t particularly like either approach.
Being interested in something doesn’t automatically make it a good business.
I could love a subject that hardly anybody else cares about or where very few people ever spend money.
At the same time, choosing a huge profitable market that I have no connection with isn’t necessarily much better.
I still have to create content about it.
I still have to answer people’s questions, understand their problems, produce things that help them and keep doing that long after the excitement of starting something new has disappeared.
For me, the better niche usually sits somewhere in the middle.
There are people I understand and can genuinely help, there is a problem or outcome they care about, I have some real connection with that subject, and there is a sensible way of making money from helping them.
That combination is far more useful than asking which niche happens to be hot right now.
You need to know who you help and where you are taking them
Knowing the audience is only part of the picture.
You also need to understand what those people are trying to achieve.
If somebody arrives at Point A, what does Point B look like for them?
That could mean helping somebody build their first email list, create their first digital product, lose weight, learn a language, plan a trip or solve some other specific problem.
Once I understand the person and the result they want, my positioning becomes much clearer.
This is why I like a very simple way of thinking about a USP.
I help a particular type of person move from one situation to another so they can achieve a tangible result.
It doesn’t have to use those exact words.
The important part is that another human being can understand it quickly.
If I need three paragraphs of marketing language to explain who I help, I’m probably not clear enough yet.
This is where the rest of the business starts to make sense
The graphic above shows the basic model I use when thinking about an online business.
The most important part for this article is at the beginning.
I start with an audience, understand what they need and work out how I can position myself in a way that makes sense to them.
Once that foundation is clear, the rest becomes much easier.
I can create content that attracts the right people, use suitable platforms to distribute it, move some of those people onto an email list and continue helping them there.
Over time, that relationship can lead naturally to my own products, affiliate recommendations, coaching or whatever monetisation model fits the business.
The individual platforms can change.
The products can change too.
What matters is that the whole thing starts with the right people and a clear reason for helping them.
If I get that first part wrong, everything underneath becomes harder.
A simple way to test a niche before committing
I don’t think you need a complicated scoring system.
Before I commit to a niche, I’d want to be able to answer four basic questions.
Do I understand the people in this market well enough to create useful content for them?
Do I have a genuine connection to the subject through experience, knowledge, results or a strong willingness to learn it properly?
Are there clear problems or goals that these people care enough about to spend money solving?
Can I see myself continuing to create useful content around this subject once the novelty wears off?
If I can’t answer those questions reasonably well, I’d think carefully before building a business around it.
That doesn’t mean every answer needs to be perfect.
It means I need enough evidence that the decision makes sense both personally and commercially.
You won’t research your way to complete certainty
At some point, you have to choose.
You can research for weeks and still not know exactly how a niche will work out.
You won’t know which articles people will respond to until you publish them or which questions keep appearing until you start talking to people.
And you won’t know exactly where your own strengths fit until you start using them.
That is when real feedback becomes more useful than another spreadsheet.
People reply to emails.
They ask questions.
Some articles attract attention while others disappear without a trace.
Certain subjects get people talking.
Others don’t.
You start noticing the same problems appearing again and again.
That information helps you adjust your positioning, your content and eventually your offers.
In other words, some of the clarity arrives after you start.
That is one of the reasons I think so many people remain stuck. They assume clarity should come first and action should come afterwards, when often the action is what creates the clarity.
I had enough reasons to choose Nagoya
When I chose Nagoya, I didn’t know what the next twenty or thirty years would look like.
I knew the job made sense financially.
I knew Japan interested me.
And I had a small connection with the city through football.
That was enough to make a reasonable decision.
Everything else came afterwards.
Choosing a niche doesn’t need to be much more mysterious than that.
You need people you understand, problems or goals you can genuinely help with, a real reason for wanting to serve that audience and a sensible business model behind it.
Then you have to choose something and start.
The guidebook never told me Nagoya would become home.
It couldn’t.
Some things only become clear after you make the decision and live with it.