Niche Marketing - The Basics

Niche marketing is marketing that is focused specifically on the needs of a very targeted group of users. Such a market is typically not large, so that the competition is manageable for the new players.

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. Pay attention to those particular keywords which has a good potential for profit and not a lot of competition in the search engine rankings.

* Build a website or blog for Adsense revenue or revenue from other ad networks. You can also aim to sell your own or affiliate products.

* 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.

* Keep building those anchored backlinks until you get to the number one spot in Google, or at least to the top of the first page.

You can do it in many different combinations but the basic steps are outlined above.

Investment Needed

Your own domain name and your own web host are two things that you really must pay for. A domain name will set you back less than $1 per month while a web hosting account would cost about $10 per month. If you pay for nothing else, you must pay for this.

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:

* Paid writers for your articles, websites and blogs. You can look for them at job sites like eLance.

* Submitting your articles to all the various article directories, websites and blogs is time-consuming and probably one of the most boring activities known to man. If you can afford it, you really must get a service that automates the submission.

* Exchanging links with other webmasters can become a breeze if you subscribe to services that brings together webmasters interested in link exchange. Some of the paid services comes with scripts that you install on your website so that the whole link exchange process is quite automated.

Skills Needed

A relatively good command of English would definitely be recommended, especially if you intend to write the content and articles yourself. You don’t have to be a writer, but you must at least be able to write grammatically correct sentences and be disciplined enough to spell check your work.

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.

I have broken down niche marketing into a series of simple steps. But those steps cannot be looked at in isolation. You must look at those steps as part of a business, a niche marketing business. As a niche marketer, you are the boss of your niche marketing business. And the decisions that you make for your business must be made not as the niche marketer but as the boss of the niche marketing business.