Niche Marketing
Niche Marketing Overview
So what is niche marketing, what does it mean? According to Wikipedia niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing. You can summarize like this: Identifying a tightly focused group of people with common interest – Niche, willing to pay for products or information or services to that interest and promoting a suitable product or service to that group of people.
So now comes next set of question: how to find niches, what is the right niche for you, how can I find profitable niche, are these niches over competitive and so on. In order to become successful in Niche marketing you need to conduct Niche Market Research.
Niche Market Research Steps
- Before doing any research you need to look within yourself, Instead of looking outside and trying to find the niche just because it has money making opportunity. There are plenty of money making ideas going to come to you every single day but it is much better for you to go to the niche that you love and have a passion for, that means something to you. Finding such a niche means that you going to be there for a long time, you are going to be committed to it. So ideal niche is the one that you have a personal connection to and the one that has a money making opportunity:
- How long people are actively interested in the niche. For example there is good chance that people that interested in candle making are going to buy a multiple products in 3-6 month span and they are going to be interested in how to make candles the same 3 to 6 months or even several years. So you are looking for people who are passionate about their hobby over extended period of a time, who wants to continue their education in particular niche.
- How deep is niche market run, how many sub-niches in the niche you are considering. For example in Internet Marketing there are many sub-niches people could be interested in: Adsense, Adwords, PPC, CPA, Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing etc.
- Try to identify people where you want to be in the next couple of years in your chosen niche, people who already done it, copy what they do, try to find people who already making money and emulate them. Do not try to come out with the next greatest big project idea, instead find successful people and copy them. Don’t do it on your own, follow the lead of other successful marketers
- Are there any informational products selling in your niche and if there are then how well and how long people are selling them. Go to the markets that are competitive, if you can find many digital products within the niche you are thinking about, that means that there are a lot of people already making money and that is a good news. A lot of people want to go to niche where no one is in but there is probably a good reason that no one is there, most likely people are not making money in those niches. Instead if you go to more competitive markets all you have to do is divert some of the money that flowing there to your bank account.
And this brings up to Most important topic of Niche Marketing which is Keyword Research
Keyword Research
In Niche Marketing Niche and Keyword Research are synonymous! That is because on Internet people who have a common need or desire can be defined in terms of the keywords that they are enter into the Search Engines as they go looking for products or services that meets that needs or desire. So we can target these specific groups of people by focusing on the keywords that they tend to enter to define that need.
But not all keywords are equal, some keywords have more traffic than the others and some keywords are more competitive than others, meaning that for some of them there are more Internet pages created compare to others. For example there are million of pages that target term ‘Halloween costume’ but for the term ‘German beer girl costume’ there are not that many. As a successful Internet Marketer you are looking for keywords that have a commercial value which is a measure of potential profitability. For example word ‘free’ indicate that people who include this keyword in their searches are less likely to buy anything, and on the other hand people who include product name in their searches are more likely willing to buy.
There is an excellent video that explains markets, niches, keyword research and relationships between them from one of my favorite keyword research tools Market Samurai.
I did not buy a copy of Market Samurai but instead I used a free 7 days trial and I found it to be very helpful. Market Samurai comes with a free educational set of videos about the software and keyword research in general. I’m not going to go into deep details of their teachings but here is the brief description.
They compare process of keyword research with panning for gold. You select a niche, generate a large amount of keywords for the niche, separate good keywords from the bad ones using their or any other software, or you can do it manually and you will end up what they call golden nuggets keywords. And what are characteristics of golden keywords? They are:
Relevance
Keyword must be highly relevant to the content of your site. Many people overlook relevance thinking that the most important aspect is traffic and trying to achieve high ranking in Google to generate a lot of traffic to their site. But if content of the site is not relevant to the targeted keywords then people will not be interested in the visited web site. So it is important to understand that key to success is not just Traffic but Targeted Traffic
Traffic
There are some keywords that generate a lot of traffic an some that not. According MS over 90% of all keywords generate very low levels of traffic. They also explain the difference between searches and traffic. The number of searches for a particular keyword that Google shows is very different to the number of people that will click on search result. Here is the breakdown of average percentages:
- 1st ranked site receives 42% of clicks
- 2nd ranked site receives 12% of clicks
- 3rd ranked site receives 8% of clicks
- 4th ranked site receives 6% of clicks
- 5th ranked site receives 5% of clicks
- 6th ranked site receives 4% of clicks
- 7th ranked site receives 3% of clicks
And the rest of clicks are shared between all the other sites listed in Google.
So it is much more realistic to base your analysis on how many potential clicks your site will receive than the overall number of searches for selected keywords.
Competition
According to MS this most people fail because they break this rule. Everyone is trying to get their site listed on the first page of Search Engine, and there are only 10 spots available. The nature of competition that you don’t have to have a perfect website, all you need to do to rank a little bit better than your next competitor. Y0u need to consider two aspects of competition:
Amount of competition, meaning how many pages are there competing for a certain keyword phrase. Some of the keywords have a lot of people competing for top 10 spots and some have lower level of competition.
Strength of competition. For example for one keyword listings are dominated by big authoritative sites, well SEO optimized, over 10 years old. Second keyword has simple websites, not optimized, relatively new. You should compete for the second keyword, because it is much easier to obtain top rankings in front page listings of Search Engines.
So the key to successful online business is to learn how to only target keywords for which you have a good chance to achieve first page rankings.
Commerciality
So what is commerciality and why is it so important. Commerciality is a measure of the potential profitability of a keyword phrase. Imagine you’ve chosen very relevant keyword phrase that has good level of traffic and acceptable level of competition and you build well optimized web site and achieve listing on the 1st page on Google but nobody buying anything. That means that you’ve targeted keyword with low level of commerciality. The best way to check is by using Google Adwords if you don’t own keyword research software like MS. All you need to do is to find out how much advertisers pay for your desired keyword when someone clicks on their ad.
Learning Keywords
Another way to do keyword research which is kind of not conventional but very effective I’ve learned from Brian G Jonson’s free ‘Loan Wolf Passive Profits” at his awesome site netmarketingcourse.net. What Brian is teaching that lately due to Google algorithm changes if you search for physical products the first page is dominated by big Authoritative Merchant websites that run by corporations and over 10 years in age. You can’t win against sites like Amazon.com, BestBuy, Target, Macy’s and so on. Even product reviews are dominated buy big sites like cnet.com, merchant themselves, and even though it is not impossible to rank for certain reviews of the product it will require a lot of time and effort.
But Brian teaches a different approach which is based on learning keywords. A lot of people are going on internet to educate themselves, to find solutions to they everyday problems and challenges. So by using keywords like :
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you can get much faster and easier rankings. For example instead of trying to get ranking for keyword ‘computer’ it will be much easier to qualify for the phrase ‘how to build a computer’. Please see his video here – Learning Keywords Video.
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