Niche MarketingNiche Marketing – Part Two: From the Niche Marketing – Part One post I suggested that you need to work out the 2 main metrics for competition and profitability of your intended niche. To start off this process I want to consider keywords.

What is a Keyword?

As a simple definition, a keyword is a word or phrase that a visitor enters into a search site such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc., to find information or products they are interested in.

As an Internet Marketer, discovering the correct keyword(s) to use on your web pages is THE most important research that you will undertake. These are the money words that will deliver to you, targeted visitors. Once you have these visitors, your web page must close the sale, or at the very least it must pre-sell the product or service, before you direct the visitor off site, through your affiliate link, to make their purchase and your commission.

Well that’s the definition and the desire, but in reality things get a little more complicated. Why? you ask. The simple answer is because of the sheer size of the competition out there.

For example, a new internet marketer may have an idea that they wish to sell digital cameras (we have all gone through these “brilliant” niche ideas at least once in our online careers). So the keyword you would target here would be “digital camera” yes? Well yes you could, but it is unlikely you would make it to the first 100 pages of search results on Google because it is just so competitive.

If I google for digital camera right now, I get 113,000,000 results. If I make the search an exact search by searching for “digital camera” in quotes, I reduce the results to just 73,300,000. And that is still far to many to even attempt to compete with if you don’t have a 6 or 7 figure advertising budget.

If you remember the niche definition from the first post, then the digital camera niche is pretty much like a chapter in the book analogy.

So, am I telling you to avoid building a business selling digital cameras online? Absolutely not.

By researching more keywords in this niche, you can focus (pun intended) on finding a far less competitive niche for example “waterproof digital cameras”. An exact search on google reveals only 275,000 competing search results and getting a good ranking on page one is do-able.

What is a Longtail Keyword?

I’ve no doubt that sooner than later you will come across this term. In a nutshell, it generally refers to a keyword with 3 or more words in it. So “Digital Camera” is a keyword and “Waterproof Digital Camera” is an associated longtail keyword.

In general, longtail keywords have less competition, and therefore are easier to gain top positions in the search results. They don’t bring lots of traffic individually but if you target a lot of longtail keywords the potential is there to get lots of easy traffic. Not everyone is capable of ranking highly for highly competitive keywords (digital camera, remember?) but anybody, new marketers and old, can rank for longtail keywords.

Besides being much easier to rank for, a real benefit of longtail keywords is that visitors convert amazingly well to sales and/or clicks. The visitors searching for longtail keywords know exactly what they want, be it “black waterproof digital camera” or “cheap Canon EOS-1D Mark IV digital camera”. They know exactly what they want and hopefully you can provide it to them.

In the next Niche Marketing post, I’ll explain more about using the Google Adwords tool to help in identifying profitable and less competitive keywords.

Related posts:

  1. Niche Marketing – Part One

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