Niche Marketing – The Basics
Niche marketing can be defined as marketing to a subset of a larger market segment. Although the market size will not be very big, the needs of such a market will have the advantage of being much more focused.
Online, niche marketing usually refers to the technique of entering a niche market in which the search engine competition is low compared to the potential or profitability of the market. Usually, you will go about it in this way:
* Research keywords that a surfer will use to find what they want. Look out for those particular keywords which has a good potential for profit and not a lot of competition in the search engine rankings.
* Build a blog or website around those keywords.
* Optimize your blog posts, or website pages, for your targeted keywords.
* Get inbound links to your site or blog by submitting articles to the article directories. In addition, you can also network with other webmasters and get links between your sites or blogs.
* Just continue building backlinks using the previous techniques until your blog or website is ranked in the position that you want in Google.
You can do it in many different combinations but the basic steps are listed above.
Investment Needed
In my opinion, you must pay for your domain name and web hosting. They will cost you less than $11 per month. The advantages of paying for those far weighs the small cost incurred.
There are other services you might want to consider spending money on as they will increase your productivity, and in the long run, give you a better return on the time you spent:
* You can choose to write all the content yourself but it is time consuming. If you have the budget, you can consider getting a writer or writers for at least some of your content.
* Services that automate the submission of your articles to article directories, blogs and websites.
* Getting other webmasters to exchange links with you would also take up a large portion of your time. There are some services that brings together webmasters interested in link exchanges, and some would even monitor the backlinks resulting from link exchanges for you.
Skills Required
You don’t have to be William Shakespeare, but you must have good grammar and be able to present your ideas in a clear and concise fashion. In addition, good spelling is also a prerequisite. Even if you are intending to outsource the writing, there will be times when you would want to do a simple rewrite to avoid being flagged for duplicate content.
When you are starting out, you will be doing a lot of the computer and web related work yourself. You will find yourself installing software, updating your name servers, configuring your web hosting package, and other related stuff. You don’t have to be a computer whiz as instructions will be provided, but you do have to be computer literate enough to understand those instructions.
Niche marketing cannot be seen as just a sales job but must be seen in the larger context of a business. And by its very definition, each business is unique. Although I have broken niche marketing into a few simple steps, you must look at those steps as an integrated whole, that is, as a business. As a niche marketer, you are not a salesman but a businessman.