What, Exactly, Is Niche Marketing and How Do I Make a Profit?

Copyright by Jude Wright, July, 2007. All Rights Reserved.

Niche Marketing is about finding a subject and drilling down within that subject to find the narrowest niche possible. That niche, however, must be a profitable one.

It is very tempting to look for a broader market in hopes of attracting more visitors to a website. Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect. Most of these visitors are not interested in what you have to offer. They are looking for something specific when they type a word or phrase into their browser.

So, how can you find these profitable niche markets?

First, you find the keywords that are looked for the most in your chosen broad topic. Then, you use Yahoo or Google keyword tools to find the best ones for your purpose.

Now, you need to go to a search engine like Google or Yahoo and look for your competition. Type in your keywords, one at a time, and find out how many websites are about the same topic as yours. You are looking for keywords whre there are a high number of searches but fewer competing websites.

Look at your competitors' websites to see what they are doing. What kinds of information do they have and how are they presenting it? Take notes, but do not - I repeat - do NOT copy their site. The copywrite police will get you. Try to come up with a unique way to present that information. Also look at which affiliate programs they are promoting. They might also be profitable for you and your site.

It's time to make a decision. Are you going to sell a product or are you going to promote affiliate products? If you want your own product, it's time to create it - from scratch or by rewriting a PLR product.

Once you have found a profitable niche, you'll look for products that fit within that niche. It won't do you any good to put a gambling banner on a tennis information website.

You will need to register a domain name and get hosting for your new website. Then, you'll start creating your web pages. There's a lot of information on the Internet about website templates and how to edit them to suit your needs.

Be sure that you add the appropriate meta tags to each of your web pages as you create them. That means using your page (topic) keyword in the title, having a description that contains the keywords or keyword phrases, and the meta keywords themselves.

It's finally time to get your website on the Internet. And, the most difficult phase begins: promoting your site. Here are a few promotion tactics to get you started:

1. Write articles. This is still the best and most reliable way to get your name, and your website, noticed.

2. Create a blog and post content to it regularly. The search engines seem to love blogs and they get indexed quickly.

3. Start a newsletter and build your list. Your opt-in email list is the most important asset of your online business.

4. Visit forums in your niche topic. Register, complete your member profile with your site name and URL and start posting your questions and answer other members' questions. Don't advertise in your post or you will get banned.

There are many more promotion tactics but these will give you a good start.

Niche marketing can be very lucrative. But, you have to be persistent and focus on completing each task. The most important thing is to actually do something! You can plan all you like, but until you take action you won't see a profit.