Niche Marketing – Part One
Niche Marketing – Part One: This post is targeted at absolute beginners, so those of you with some experience, please bear with me.
First off, what is a niche?
In simple terms, if you can imagine that everything that could possibly be sold, anywhere on our planet, was written into a book, then a niche can be defined as anything from a chapter in that book, right down to a single word or letter even.
From this analogy you can see that the larger niches are nearly always made up of smaller niches (chapters, pages, paragraphs, sentences, words all made up from letters). In general, the larger the niche, the harder it is to target successfully because large niches are very difficult, and usually expensive, to get your website rated for as you will be competing with large national and international companies.
You really have two main options when choosing a niche: -
- knowledge based, or
- money based.
These are not mutually exclusive though. For a knowledge based niche, you will be relying on your own experience and/or interests to build an informative website about a subject (niche) that you are passionate about. These types of website are by far the easiest to build as you have a real interest in making it an informative resource for others to enjoy. The monetization is almost secondary to the sharing of knowledge. This site you are on now is just such a niche.
Money based niches are a different breed altogether, in that they require in depth research to discover their profitability, and to analyze competing websites before you commit. Whilst it’s pretty simple to decide on a knowledge based niche (you know what you know right?), finding a profitable money based niche can take time.
There are three pretty good places to look for good ideas: eBay, Amazon and Google. By browsing their lists of categories and sub-categories some ideas will occur to you. If you’re just starting out, avoid the obvious (iPhone, iPod, digital cameras) choices. Those markets are very saturated and can be very tough to break in to.
Once you start on the path of niche hunting, you’ll be surprised where great ideas occur to you, be it in the supermarket, the mall, the cinema (yes I spotted a great niche idea when watching a movie!), or just about everywhere. As I look out of my home office window as I write this, I can see hanging baskets, security alarms, satellite dishes and that’s without really looking.
When you see these niche ideas, don’t forget to make a note before you forget them, it does happen, the human memory is fallible.
OK, you have your list of potential niches, what should you do next?
You need to discover:-
- How competitive the market already is for that niche, and,
- How profitable it CAN be. This profitability has to be a relative, quantitative measure that you can compare niches. It is not a measurement of actual earnings.
In Niche Marketing – Part 2, we’ll take a closer look at these 2 metrics for competition and profitability.
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Tagged with: Internet Marketing • niche • niche marketing
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