Niche Marketing - Thinking Small for Earning Big

Continuing our series on Internet Marketing, here's the next installment .....

Ask any successful Internet marketer what the secret to online success is and you'll get a host of different answers. But dig a little deeper and almost all of them will eventually tell you that one of the big secrets is to concentrate your efforts onto a monetizable niche market. So what is niche marketing and how do you find a niche that you can make money from?

That's what this article plans to uncover for you.

A monetizable niche market is, at its simplest, that part of a crowd that is hungriest.

A hot dog stand outside a restaurant isn't likely to do much business, but put the same stand outside a cinema or theater and it will sell out. The people walking past are similar, but some are hungrier than others.

The trick to successful niche marketing is to be able to identify which parts of an audience are ready to buy and to aim all your efforts at persuading them to buy via you.

To give you an example, someone searching with the keyword 'digital camera' is certainly searching for something, but we have no real idea of their intent. The chances are that they are simply dipping a toe into the market to get some background info.

There are 134,000 searches made every day for 'digital cameras' but you could spend a huge amount of time and effort trying to grab a share of that traffic and still have little to show for it at the end.

They are lookers, not buyers.

The next step up after they have done their background research would be for them to search on a manufacturer, so 'Nikon Digital Cameras' might crop up. Is this a niche market keyword? Not yet. They are warmer, but not yet hot. They are still finding stuff out, comparing models and checking price ranges.

But they are not buyers. Not yet.

Nikon Digital Camera is a topic - and possibly a good one to base a whole site or a section of a site upon, but for our individual pages we need to focus on the niches inside the topic.

So, having decided that they like Nikon cameras more than the competition the next step - the buying step - is for them to narrow their research down even more to a particular model.

Someone who searches on 'Nikon D40 Digital Camera' is in the market to buy. They know what they want and now just need to be reassured and pointed at Amazon.

So a brand name is a niche market, but it still isn't necessarily a great niche market. The number of people searching for a term is important, but not all-important. We must also look at the number of websites we would be in competition with if we were to put in the effort to build one of our own.

A great niche market is one where there are lots of hungry, desperate-to-buy searchers, but few websites satisfying their needs.

In the Nikon D40 Digital Cameras example, there are nearly half a million pages online in competition with us - and as we want the easiest route to getting high Google rankings for the pages we build, that is way too much competition!

We are getting warmer, but it isn't hot, hot, hot quite yet!

A few more minutes work and the following products emerge: Samsung T550 Camera, Polaroid Pogo Camera and Fuji Waterproof Camera. Between them they attract over 10,000 searches per month, but none have more than 7,000 competing web pages already out there. Now that's competition we can set about beating!

Niche marketing is about getting the biggest bang for your buck, the greatest return for your effort. The skill lies in learning how to use your keyword research tools to uncover the millions of phrases people regularly type into the search engines that indicate they are in a buying mood, and to keep researching them until you find ones where there is the least amount of competition.

Then build a web page, make it as authoritative as possible, fine tune the on-page SEO to make it on-target as far as the search engines are concerned and develop the off-page SEO by building a network of backlinks. Then add monetization through affiliate links and watch as your hard work reaps its rewards.

To learn more about how to research a niche market, in detail Click Here!.

And for the ultimate stripped down and simple method of niche marketing, Click Here!

Now we're getting somewhere !!!!!