Internet marketing is a huge field with a lot of potential. However, it can be difficult to get your message noticed amongst all the competition. You may have already experienced this through unsuccessful marketing campaigns, poor sales, or low traffic numbers. It is important to specialize and pick a specific niche to focus your efforts to get greater results.
What is a niche market?
A niche market is any market that is highly focused and selective. For example, the ‘diet’ marketplace is huge but very competitive. It is very hard for the average person to compete in the ‘diet’ world. However, if you select a highly focused niche within the diet market you drastically improve your chances for success. For example, ‘vegetarian diets for women over 40’ is a very selective niche.
Why you need to find a niche
While a niche has a much smaller market there is also much less competition. Don’t forget – when you are marketing online, even the tiniest niches can have a huge following. This huge following has the potential for generating a large cash flow. Since there is less competition in any given niche, there is less work to do to get your message noticed. This leaves you more time to target more niches. One niche may not provide all the income you are looking for, but you can set up multiple marketing campaigns, each targeting a different niche. This allows you to build multiple streams of income from several different niches.
How to find the right niche
There are many ways to find a niche. Here are some tips to help you find the best one for your needs:
- It is best if you target a niche that you are familiar with or are interested in learning about. This will go a long way in assisting you with your marketing efforts
- There are many websites that are organized hierarchically. These websites allow you to choose a general area and dig down deep into more and more specific sub-topics. Each of these sub-topics are potential niches that you can target. Here are some websites to get you started:
- Check on forums to see what people are talking about, what they are asking about, and most of all, what they are looking for. If you are in a car forum and people are looking for a specialty brand of tires, or tires that meet a certain criteria, this can be your niche within the ‘tire’ marketplace.
- There are also excellent paid resources online that will provide information on how to find the best niches as well as how to target them. For example, the NicheQ Research Reports from Wealthy Affiliate. These reports offer PLR articles, SEO keyword concepts and lists, prewritten emails, and more.
Targeting your niche
Once you have chosen a niche you need a way to market to it. Here are a few steps on how to do this:
- Market research: Gather information that you can use to better understand what people are looking for as well as use in your marketing efforts to attract your target market.
- Find a product: If you don’t already have a product then find an affiliate program that offers a relevant product. You can check the main affiliate marketing websites such as amazon.com or clickbank. Alternative, you can search Google for your niche and include the keyword ‘affiliate’ in your search.
- Determine your marketing approach: In order to attract people to your website you need to have a marketing strategy – for example, PPC or article marketing.
- Keyword research: when choosing keywords for your marketing campaign you want to target long tail keywords that are specific to your niche and have a lot of searches but not a lot of competition in the search engines.
Hopefully this has given you some ideas on how find a niche market as well as create a marketing plan for it. Unfortunately there isn’t enough space in this article to expand on all the steps but you can find more relevant information on my blog. There is a lot to learn in internet marketing which is why it is good to not only get information from around the internet, but to also sign up for a solid training system that will teach you the ins and outs of the business and give you the best foundation for your online marketing efforts.