The smaller these groups are, the better and more effective your marketing results will be. I have seen it happen with email marketing, where tightly targeted groups are often the most responsive.

But even if you are going after a broader niche, there is no reason you cannot segment it into separate, more narrowly niched sub-groups.

One way to cluster your audience is by creating specialized 'sub-niche' content for them. For instance, for a home-based business audience, you might offer products and services in sub-niches like:

* marketing
* product creation
* fulfillment services
* ongoing education
* networking
* legal
* accounting
* asset protection
* taxes

Each of these are of interest to some of your general target market. So you might create an information product (an ecourse, or report, or ebook) on the smaller topic - and offer it to your general audience. The ones who are interested in the sub-niche will respond to your offer - and by collecting their details, you now have a smaller group within your target audience, but one that has evinced interest in one specific aspect of it.

A few people will have interests that span different categories - and that's fine too.

Or to take another example, if you are building a list of contacts to keep informed about a general topic, and generate your revenue from either charging a membership fee for the information, or sell related products and services to the audience, the broader your niche the better.

On the other hand, if your product or service is a specialized one not relevant to many people in the niche (e.g. you have something for elderly women, which rules out men and young women), you'd do better by defining your niche more narrowly.