What is a Niche Market and How Do I Find Mine
The word niche is derived from a French term nichier (to nest) or from the Italian nicchio (seashell).
According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, and in regards to internet marketing, a niche is
“A situation or activity specially suited to a person’s interests, abilities, or nature.” and “A special area of demand for a product or service.”
Finding a niche is easy for some and difficult for others. Mozart found his niche fairly early in life while on the other hand I know some people who are in their forties and still haven’t found their niche, then again, I suppose sitting on the couch and watching sports could be considered a niche. However, in the realm of internet marketing, niche has a different meaning altogether.
Niche marketing and more specifically affiliate marketing is all about finding profitable niches. Weight loss, insurance, make money online, and web design are all considered niches. They are all quite profitable niche markets as well if you know how to properly monetize a website. However, these niche markets are also massively competitive and even the most adept guru would have difficulty making a profitable website from scratch with any of these. And good luck finding an available domain name that has the niche name in it.
So how do you go about finding a profitable niche these days? A good place to start is Goggle. There is an adwords tool that anyone can use for free here https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Start off by brainstorming some general topics, enter the topic word or words into the tool and hit the Get keyword ideas button. When your list of keywords comes up be sure to select “Exact” from the Match Type dropdown. In the choose columns to display drop-down select Estimated Avg. CPC. Now your ready.
The two most important columns are the Estimated Avg. CPC and the Global Monthly Search. The CPC column shows how much a click on an ad that targets that keyword is worth. The Global Monthly Search column show how many searches there are for that keyword. The trick to finding a niche is to find a keyword to target that a) pays well b) gets a lot of monthly searches and c) is not too competitive for you.
If you were to target weight loss, which definitely pays well and gets a ton of searches, you would be up against the heaviest of the heavy weights (pardon the pun) in internet niche and affiliate marketing. If you do a Goggle search on weight loss there isn’t a site on page one of the results that has less than a page rank of 4. There are PR6 sites even on the 6th page of the results. This basically means that in order to get any traffic at all to your site you would have to have it optimized perfectly, get about 20,000 other sites to link to it using “weight loss” or “lose weight” or some other variation as the anchor text and then post a new article every day for the next six months targeting your main keyword and fifty other related ones as well. Its doable but very few people have the time and determination for that kind of effort.
Long-tail keywords are a much easier prey. Weight Loss in Boston, Lose Weight Watching TV, and How to Lose Weight While Frying An Egg are examples of long-tail keywords. These are much harder to find but much easier to get to the front of a search results page. And that’s where a site needs to be in order to get decent traffic. People don’t generally click through to page 7 of the Goggle search results pages, they generally click on one of the first 3 or 4 listings.
Once you have found a niche you are comfortable with, one that is not too competitive, gets a decent amount of monthly searches and pays pretty well it is time to hunt for a suitable domain name. Your domain name should contain your main keyword, it obviously doesn’t have to but it has been proven to help immensely. Now all you need to do is build the site and monetize it with clinkbank offers or Adsense or one of the hundreds of other ways to make your site profitable.
Sounds simple doesn’t it. Well don’t let me give you the wrong impression as this is a very brief description, a general overview of what is involved when attempting to make money online. The internet is packed full of much more in depth information on keyword selection, on-site SEO, off-site SEO, website building, and site monetization. The best place to start however is to identify your niche market.
Tags: affiliate marketing, CPC, Internet Marketing, make money online, monetization, niche, niches, website
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I know this if off topic but I’m looking into starting my own weblog and was wondering what all is needed to get setup? I’m assuming having a blog like yours would cost a pretty penny? I’m not very internet smart so I’m not 100% positive. Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated. Kudos