What is Niche Marketing?

So I was looking at my previous entries here at seo-hacker and I just came to realize I’ve been very unstrategic in my posts. Why?

Because I think (and thanks for putting up with this) that at frequent instances, I’ve just been throwing random internet marketing terms at you and haven’t really begun with the ultimate basics.

And because of that, I figured better to start now than any time later.

What’s the first thing on our ultimate basic list? Niche marketing.

What is Niche Marketing?

The definition is self-explanatory of course. Niche marketing refers to marketing within a distinct or specified in realization that the more you focus on such markets, the more you’ll be able to attract and target the really interested readers/viewers/buyers or just audience in general. Usually this is done in the web through creating a niche site.

How do you indentify or name niche markets? This is where research of every internet marketers begins. First, identify a broad topic that you’re interested in (or at least one you find profitable). Then, you’d need to map out sub-topics underneath. Every sub-topic though will usually have even more specific topics. The rule of thumb is, if you can’t split a sub-topic anymore, then you’ve probably arrived at the most targeted niche possible.

This is where the real game begins.

What’s the point of Niche Marketing?

Niche marketing is a strategy to (guess what) market more, faster. You might’ve noticed this already, marketing online is all about targeting. You’re always competing with thousands (millions even) of websites, the last thing you want to do is to get buried because you’ve stuck with a really general topic that obviously won’t merit you a high ranking because some circle of big fishes are dominating the market.

What to do in Niche Marketing?

Here’s the meat of this content. Niche marketing is all about making a website and ranking it high to attract traffic. Remember, traffic equals profits right? When you do niche marketing, it basically involve the following steps:

1) Build a website. A mini website to be exact if you don’t intend to keep an eye on it for years to come. SEO-optimize it. I don’t believe you’d need to shell out large sums of money just to develop one, as long as you keep a decent theme and run on seo-optimized CMS (like wordpress), you’ll be fine.

2) Create and publish articles. This wouldn’t be too hard if you know your way around Private Label Rights (PLR articles). You can either a) get PLR articles online, look for your niche articles, and have them re-written by an online writer (you can look for one at the Digital Point Forums) or b) make articles on your own. But yeah, it can be awfully hard and time-consuming.

3) Start the SEO campaign. I’m pretty sure you can find more than enough tips on Sean’s posts 😉

4) Integrate your products or the things you want to promote in the niche. And this very much explains how you can make money out of niche marketing. Typically, along with researching for the niche, you’d have to research (like in Clickbank) for good products that can go with it.

You can promote a multiple of products of course, but it’s always better to focus on one, or a few handpicked quality products. Or you can also integrate PayPerClick (PPC ads)and make money out of clickthroughs.

5) Optimize site, convert traffic into sales! Keep testing and optimizing your site to fully maximize it’s money-making potential. You can research about good lay-outs and ad/banner placements for this.

Well, that wraps up the basics of niche marketing. Of course, the more you practice it, the more you’ll get to know the nitty-gritty details. Niche marketing is how internet marketers build an empire of sites.

If you think about it, it’s not actually as complicated as that ‘empire of sites’ is only made up of a number of mini-sites that requires minimal handling. Some of them are even on auto-pilot. So really, this all boils down to how resourceful and well-equipped you are with the right technology (like keyword research tools etc.). With the drive to learn, I’m pretty sure you’ll get the hang of it within a few months’ time.