Niche Marketing - How to Find Your Perfect Niche Market
 © Herman Drost

If you don't find a niche market for the product or service
you offer, you will most probably fail. Most newcomers who
wish to do business on the Internet often market to
everyone they can find with the expectation that everyone
will do business with them. This is the same as throwing
mud against the wall and hoping some of it will stick. They
have not yet found their niche market.

What is niche marketing?

A niche market is composed of individuals and businesses
that have similar interests and needs, which can be readily
identified and that can be easily targeted and reached.

Finding a niche for your business means finding a great
product or service for a highly targeted audience.

Here's the process to find your niche business:

1. Find a niche product or service you are passionate about
- this will greatly improve your chances of being
successful. Why? Because it's the only way you're going to
be able to devote the kind of time and effort to create a
meaningful web site, build up the right traffic, generate
worthwhile income, and enjoy what you're doing.

2. Choose a niche product or service you are knowledgeable
about - reflect on what skills, hobbies or products you
know the most about. If you don't have the knowledge yet,
then choose a niche product that you would love to promote,
then spend the necessary time to research it, so you can
eventually become an expert in your marketing niche.

3. Define your niche market - do the necessary research to
see if there is a market for your niche product. To create
a profitable business for your niche product, you need to
ask yourself these questions:

a) Is there sufficient demand for it? - if you choose a
field that is too broad it may be hard to stand out from
the competition ie camping equipment is your niche product.
Well, unless you are a large corporation such as Sports
Authority (a large retail store in my town), you won't
stand out from the crowd. However, a more highly targeted
niche product could be Coleman Camping Equipment.

b) Keyword research - use keyword tools such as the
overture suggestion tool or wordtracker  to how many people
are searching each month on keywords related to your niche
product.

Here's an example:

According to overture (at the time of writing this
article), the keyword phrase "camping equipment" was
searched 76164 times in one month. If you do a search on
Google.com for camping equipment you will find 1,610,000
web sites show up - heck, that's too competitive.

However "coleman camping equipment" generated 1242 searches
in one month according to overture. Google.com shows 93,200
competing websites. That's much better though still somewhat
competitive.

Tip: Notice how not many web sites (even the top ones),
don't have "coleman camping equipment" in their titles.
This is just one way to create a high ranking on the search
engines for your newly targeted web site. This will then
provide lots of targeted traffic to your site.

c) Take a survey – you may already have products or
services that you selling to your customers. If so, ask
questions within your survey about what product/service
would help your customers business. If it can help them
save time by gaining more knowledge or automating tasks,
you could have a winner.

d) Create Your Own Unique Selling Position (USP) - study
your competition to find out what they emphasize about the
product which makes them stand out from the crowd. Then
decide on something that will make your business unique
from the others. It could be something unique about the
product (ie discount coleman camping equipment) or you
could choose a more highly defined target market
(ie boyscout organizations and clubs throughout the USA).

4. Build and promote your web site - to develop a
profitable web site for your niche product you need to
create a number of informative pages that will not only
attract visitors from the search engines, but inform and
move them to purchase from your site.

Read my article, "How to Create a Web Site That Sells"

Niche marketing is the key to developing a profitable
business that will make you stand out from the crowd. By
doing the necessary research and building an informative
web site, you will become an expert in your niche marketing
field.

Niche Mini Site Examples:
Baby Names Guide
Hair Style Guide
Lose Weight Guide
Self Help Guide