Niche Marketing - The Basics

A niche market can be defined as a market within a larger market segment whose needs can be very specific. Typically, a niche market is too small for the big players to be interested in so the competition will be manageable for the new players. Niche marketing is simply marketing that is targeted at a niche market.

There are many ways you can go about running a niche marketing campaign. But online, where the target is usually keywords with low competition in the search engines, you would probably take the following steps:

• Do your keyword research to identify keywords that has the most potential and the least competition. Keywords are words or phrases that a surfer uses to search for their area of interest.

• Build a website or blog for Adsense revenue or revenue from other ad networks. You can also aim to sell your own or affiliate products.

• Optimize your blog posts, or website pages, for your targeted keywords.

• Get other websites and blogs to link to your website using the usual link building techniques like link exchanges, article submissions, directory submissions, etc.

• Keep building inbound links until your website ranks at the position you want in Google for your targeted keywords.

There are many variations of the above steps as they will depend on your strengths, your long term goals and the topic of the website or blog in question. What is listed above are the normal steps carried out.

Cost

Your own domain name and your own web host are two things that you really must pay for. A domain name will set you back less than $1 per month while a web hosting account would cost about $10 per month. If you pay for nothing else, you must pay for this.

There are other services you might want to consider spending money on as they will increase your productivity, and in the long run, give you a better return on the time you spent:

• Good content for your blogs, articles and websites is key to your success and, unfortunately, also takes the most time to generate. Paying for articles to be written might be a worthwhile investment.

• Services that automate the submission of your articles to article directories, blogs and websites.

• Services that reduces the time it takes to get good anchored backlinks to your site.

You will need at least passable skills in the English language. If you can write with minimal grammatical and spelling errors, and you can get your message across clearly, that should be good enough.

There is a lot of computer and web related work to do. On the computer, you might find yourself touching up some graphics, or installing a software application, or even doing some html. On the web, you would probably need to update your name servers and configure your hosting account. You don't need to be an expert to do all these, but some level of computer literacy would be needed.

Niche marketing cannot be seen as just a sales job but must be seen in the larger context of a business. And by its very definition, each business is unique. Although I have broken niche marketing into a few simple steps, you must look at those steps as an integrated whole, that is, as a business. As a niche marketer, you are not a salesman but a businessman.