Want to own your business niche? About 6 years ago I met a lady at a Sacramento Metro Chamber of Commerce trade show. She had taken a table at the event to introduce herself and a new business idea she was putting in motion which was to encourage ordinary people to do what she loved to do which was write books. Her name was Stephanie Chandler.

Prior to this new business venture, Stephanie was the owner of a local bookstore in Carmichael, CA as she loved books and helping anyone that wanted help with anything to do with writing, publishing or selling books.

From Stephanie’s humble table at the local trade show she has now built and runs a diverse range of book writing, publishing, sales and marketing services under different company names including Authority Publishing and BusinessInfoGuide.com. However, Stephanie’s core passion is writing books and she has written many including Leap! 101 ways to grow your business, From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur and Booked Up.

Stephanie’s latest book is Own Your Niche. In this book, Stephanie gives some great advice to small business owners on:

• How to identify and connect with their target audience,
• Create a website that generates traffic
• Build an effective blog
• Get results from social media – in less than one hour per day
• Create email marketing campaigns that build loyalty and more.

What particularly caught my eye are three things.

The first is that business owners are always looking for the latest and greatest place to spend their time, money and energy to be a successful business owner. What’s critical for those that are successful is that they all start as a small business and they all dominate their place in the market to grow and be successful. If you want some examples look no further than Hewlett Packard that started in a garage by Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard. What about Facebook? Its start was in a college dorm room by Mark Zuckerberg and some of his friends and now ex-friends.

The second is that to be successful in business today you need to master two or three core areas and then bring in help with the skills you lack. At its simplest level, a successful business needs strong management complemented by skills in sales, marketing, operations and finance & book-keeping. In addition, today a lot of businesses need a strong technology component. When you bring all these needs together, they are simply too much for one person and so the skill of the business owner is recognizing the skills they bring and then partnering or hiring the skills they lack.

The third and final thought, which I think is the most important, is the need to “Own Your Niche” and like I suggested in a previous article I wrote, always “Always run your business as if it is for sale.”

A successful business is always living, breathing and moving. If it doesn’t, the competition will catch up to it, remove its oxygen and close it down.

If you would like to read more about how to “Own Your Niche” you can visit Stephanie’s website at Own Your Niche.

If you would like to read more about how to “Run your business as if it is always for sale” you can do this by clicking on the following link Always run your business as if it is for sale.