Niche Marketing - How to Find Your Perfect Niche Market

If you don't find a niche market for the product or serviceyou offer, you will have a difficult time being successful.Most newcomers who wish to do business on the Internetoften market to everyone they can find with the expectationthat everyone will do business with them. This is the same as throwing mud against the wall and hoping some of it willstick. They have not yet found their niche market.

What is niche marketing?

A niche market is composed of individuals and businessesthat have similar interests and needs, which can be readilyidentified and that can be easily targeted and reached.

Finding a niche for your business means finding a greatproduct or service for a highly targeted audience.

Here's the process to find your niche business

1. Find a niche product or service you are passionate about.This will greatly improve your chances of being successful. Why? Because it's the only way you're going to be ableto devote the kind of time and effort to create ameaningful web site, build up the right traffic, generateworthwhile income, and enjoy what you're doing.

2. Choose a niche product you are knowledgeable about.Reflect on what skills, hobbies or products you know themost about. If you don't have the knowledge yet, then choose a niche product that you would love to promote,then spend the necessary time to research it, so you caneventually become an expert in your marketing field.

3. Define your niche market - do the necessary research tosee if there is a market for your niche product. To createa profitable business for your niche product, you need toask yourself these questions:

a) Is there sufficient demand for it? - if you choose afield that is too broad it may be hard to stand out fromthe competition. For example, camping equipment could beyour niche product. Well, unless you are a large corporationsuch as Sports Authority (a large retail store in my town), you won't stand out from the crowd. However, a more highly targeted niche product could be Coleman Camping Equipment.

b) Keyword research - use keyword tools such as theoverture suggestion tool(http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion)or wordtracker (wordtracker.com) to find how many people aresearching each month on keywords related to your nicheproduct.

Here's an example:

According to overture (at the time of writing thisarticle), the keyword phrase "camping equipment" wassearched 76164 times in one month. If you do a search onGoogle.com for camping equipment you will find 1,610,000web sites show up - heck, that's too competitive.

However "coleman camping equipment" generated 1242 searchesin one month according to overture. Google.com shows 93,200competing websites. That's much better though still somewhat competitive.

Tip: Notice there are not many web sites (even the top ones),that have "coleman camping equipment" in their titles.This is just one of the ways to obtain a high ranking on the search engines for your newly targeted web site. This will then provide lots of targeted traffic to your site.

c) Take a survey ? you may already have products orservices that you selling to your customers. If so, askquestions within your survey about what product or servicewould help your customers business. If it can help themsave time by gaining more knowledge or automating tasks,you could have a winner.

d) Create Your Own Unique Selling Position (USP) - studyyour competition to find out what they emphasize about theproduct which makes them stand out from the crowd. Thendecide on something that will make your business uniquefrom the others. It could be something unique about theproduct (ie discount coleman camping equipment) or youcould choose a more highly defined target market (ie boyscout organizations and clubs throughout the USAthat use coleman's camping equipment).

4. Build and promote your web site - to develop aprofitable web site for your niche product you need tocreate a number of informative pages that will not onlyattract visitors from the search engines, but inform andmove them to purchase from your site.

Read my article, "How to Create a Web Site That Sells"(http://www.isitebuild.com/buildingA.htm).

Niche marketing is the key to developing a profitablebusiness that will make you stand out from the crowd. Bydoing the necessary research and building an informativeweb site, you will become an expert in your niche marketingfield.

Resources
ebook - "Strike it Niche"