Friday, June 26, 2009

Niche Marketing

By David Lim

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 boys 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.

Online, niche marketing usually refers to the technique of entering a niche market in which the search engine competition is low compared to the potential or profitability of the market. Usually, you will go about it in this way:

* Research keywords that a surfer will use to find what they want. Pay attention to those particular keywords which has a good potential for profit and not a lot of competition in the search engine rankings.

* 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 the content in your blog posts or website pages for the search engines, keeping in mind the keywords targeted.

* Get inbound links to your site or blog by submitting articles to the article directories. In addition, you can also network with other webmasters and get links between your sites or blogs.

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

I have outlined the basic steps above but you will probably have to mix and match as necessary. Niche marketing is definitely not an exact science and you have to adjust accordingly.

Expected Cost

In my opinion, you must pay for your domain name and web hosting. They will cost you less than $11 per month. The advantages of paying for those far weighs the small cost incurred.

You might also want to consider some other services which can enhance your productivity and, in the longer term, give you a better return on the time and effort that you invested:

* You can choose to write all the content yourself but it is time consuming. If you have the budget, you can consider getting a writer or writers for at least some of your content.

* Submitting your articles to all the various article directories, websites and blogs is time-consuming and probably one of the most boring activities known to man. If you can afford it, you really must get a service that automates the submission.

* Exchanging links with other webmasters can become a breeze if you subscribe to services that brings together webmasters interested in link exchange. Some of the paid services comes with scripts that you install on your website so that the whole link exchange process is quite automated.

Skills Needed

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.

You will need to tinker with name servers and web hosting accounts to get your website or blog up and running. Some changes in the web templates supplied might also be needed, or you might even want to design your own. Instructions will be provided or can be googled, but you do have to be computer literate enough to understand and carry them out.

I have broken down niche marketing into a series of simple steps. But those steps cannot be looked at in isolation. You must look at those steps as part of a business, a niche marketing business. As a niche marketer, you are the boss of your niche marketing business. And the decisions that you make for your business must be made not as the niche marketer but as the boss of the niche marketing business.

About the Author:

No comments: