Niche Marketing- Strategies and Tips
If you are new to internet marketing or have been looking into earning a little cash online, then there is little doubt that you will eventually hear about niche marketing. But what is it, in layman’s terms?
To understand this better, think of it like this- A MARKET is all encompassing. In other words, a store like Petco sells pet products in the very general sense. They do well, because they have a strong brand and people equate a store like Petco as a place where they can get their pet products. On the other hand, a niche in the pet market could be dog or cat food.
The smaller the niche, the greater your chances of succeeding.
In the 40’s and 50’s the most successful marketers and advertisers hung onto the premise that you should advertise the most general products to the general population. In other words, you got the most bang for your marketing buck if your target market was large (for controlling costs). These days things are different, thanks largely to the many various ways consumers consume information. In this case, we are talking largely about the internet…
While it is true that if you are able to become one of the authorities in the general weight loss market, the reality is that getting there will be a lot tougher. Because of this, many marketers have found that they can compete with the bigger companies if they reduced their focus on smaller segments of a general target audience.
In other words, if you were intending to focus on the weight loss or fitness market, you may choose these niches:
- Ultra specific diets- example: the paleo diet, the zone diet, the south beach diet.
- Ultra specific products- rather than focusing on the fitness market in general, you would instead focus on products within the fitness market. Example- Fitness Equipment reviews, body weight exercises, ab crunchers, ect.
- Niches within niches- Make money online would become make money with adsense, ways to earn easy money, make money from home.
Sometimes even the sub niches within the market could be still too competitive to compete. In this case, you would dig even deeper into the market……
- Paleo Diet would become Paleo diet for athletes…for arthritic patients…for pregnant moms…
- Body weight exercises would become body weight exercises for legs…for arms…for abs…
- Make money online with adsense would become make money online with adsense for beginners, make money online with adsense books, ect. ect.
Even the Authoritative General Websites rely on ranking for the niches within their markets…
Truth be told, even the big, popular websites rely on what search engine optimization experts refer to as the “long tail” for ranking. While it is true that large amounts of traffic can hinge on competitive keywords, the niche marketer will trade in search volume for ultra-specific keywords, preferably for the searcher looking to buy something.
And the reality is that niche marketers can usually easily outrank even the hugely popular websites with a lot of trust by building websites that are very specific in terms of target market. For more on this, you should check out my SEO tips for internet marketers section which talks about what it takes to rank your website.
The how’s and what’s of Niche Marketing
Niche Marketing is really easier than you think. Most niche marketers will tend to focus on getting ranked via organic search. Some will go the pay-per-click route and then it becomes nothing more than margins and spread sheets; finding the most lucrative keywords at the lowest price OR the keywords that convert into sales without costing you your shirt.
Since most who get involved with niche marketing, usually don’t have their own product and don’t understand basic business principles like margins and ROI, they usually get started trying to rank their website in the search engines.
The most basic niche marketing strategy usually goes like this:
- Start doing keyword research with a broad market…..
- Drill down until you find the keyword phrases (aka “conversations”) that are both high volume (relatively speaking)/low competition.
- Check competition of the conversations, what they are selling, how they are selling it, ect…ect…
- Build a site that is optimized for both the search engines and either sets the tone for a sale (if you are selling someone else’s product) or directly sells the product.
- Do the other things that will help get your site ranked.
It is important to understand that niche marketing works in the same way as article marketing. You are basically going after the low hanging fruit. So, that said, you can build 100 niche websites and only get 10 visitors a day. The crux of it all…what makes it work…is your ability to select and rank for the keywords that are most likely to have customers on the right side of the buying funnel.
Niche Marketing Strategies
Where to start…the free-hosted versus self hosted debate- In this article, I discuss the very hotly debated topic on what is better, free-hosted (ie…wetpaint, weebly, hubpages, squidoo) or self hosted (one which you pay for yourself). While this isn’t necessarily intrinsic to niche marketing on the whole, it is important to realize since if you are planning on marketing and segmenting an entire website or group of pages to a small set of keywords, you can do it for free…if you want….but there is a price to pay….
….and let’s face….most niche marketers don’t have a wad of money to throw around and need to build capital before they can fully scale their niche marketing endeavors. Check it out- Free hosted versus hosting your website yourself….
Lots of mini-sites, lots of content- One of the fundamentals for niche marketers is that in order to rank, they need to provide content for the search engines. There is an art to creating content en masse. Unless you are good at content creation, you will likely want to go the route of outsourcing the job. I do have an article in which I go over how I create content that makes money online.
Niche Marketing through Trend Marketing- Another way that niche marketers target smaller markets is by negotiating their way through trends. A trend is easier to attack organically because trends are very rarely saturated. Typically a niche marketer will build a web page that is on a parasitic web host and use its trust rank to rank quickly.
Sometimes, they will utilize funnels to redirect their potential customers to already existing sites. I have an article that shows how this was done as well as some methods that niche marketers used to capitalize on trends called trend marketing explained.
Exploring Niches within Niches- As you start to understand how to target keyword phrases within a market, you will start to see the same players over and over. And for those of us who are lazy and want others to do the leg work for us for free, you will soon see that some marketers who are either too stupid to hide their footprints or don’t care one way or another will give you what is essentially their blueprint for success. In my article, niche marketing techniques for micro-niches, I go over what they are doing, and how you can profit from what they have learned.
How to do keyword research for niche markets- The title kind of explains it all. In this article, I focus on how to effectively do keyword research using various free tools to segment and dig even deeper for certain niches.
What is affiliate marketing? Since the majority of niche marketers don’t have their own products to sell, they instead opt for becoming an affiliate. Understand what affiliate marketing is as well as ways to segment the products and match them up with the right conversations is essential to making money online.
Backlink Theory- The biggest problem that every niche marketer faces isn’t always picking the right keywords. It is building the backlinks to make their web pages and websites visible to their market. In my backlink theory 101 article, I go over some of the math that goes into backlinking as well as some theories to boot.