The purpose of this article is to present various examples of Niche Marketing Tactics and Case Studies(
get my updates on this topic here) that I’ve learned in the past few years. I don’t claim to be a guru in Niche Marketing, and
Affiliate marketing, but I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned from others and my own experiences as well working as an
SEO and PPC Specialist.
First, What is A Niche Market
By definition,
a niche market is a small market segment. There are many advantages of
targeting niche markets rather than broad markets but here’s a list of
why many people love niche markets or niche marketing:
1.
You can quickly develop a website and quickly promote your products and services online.
If you’re able to find “untapped” and “hidden” niche markets, there
will be less competition on those niches, allowing you to dominate this
niche faster than saturated niches.
2.
Targeting Long Tail Keywords in Niche Markets can dramatically improve your traffic and conversions.
These long tail keywords might have less search volume, (traffic is
lower than big chunk keywords) but they are easier to rank in the search
engines, and they also
convert a lot higher than other keywords
It shows you if a website visitor converted to your goal. Did they
subscribe to your email list? Did they purchase your products and
services? These are just some examples of conversion goals that you
should constantly measure. No need for fancy tools and paid tools.
Google analytics is a Free Tool that you can use to measure goals and conversions on your website.
3.
There’s a huge opportunity to become an Authority in Niche Markets.
And authority is the name of the game nowadays. Authority websites
are loved by the search engines. It’s one of the reason’s why Google is
pushing out Google+, which is their own social network integrated into
search results. They want “experts” writing articles on the web, and
they want to reward your efforts with more visibility, traffic and
exposure.
Depending on the niche market that you’ve chosen, you might find some
niche markets are quite competitive. This is the reason, why you need
to do proper market and keyword research before you even start buying
your domain. A lot of niche marketers fail, because they’ve chosen the
wrong market, chosen the wrong keywords, or have chosen both.
Here are Some Niche Market Ideas and Other Examples of Niche Markets
For picking Niche Market Ideas I would go to Amazon’s – Best Selling Products (Updated Every Hour)
to Find out what’s hot right now. As of this moment, I’ve noticed that
“Waterproof Video Camera’s” and “Image Stabilization Binoculars” are
selling like hotcakes.
If these niches interest you, feel free to grab them.
– Just email and thank me later, when you’ve made your first sale from these niches.
I will use “
waterproof video cameras” and “
image stabilized binoculars” as niche examples below.
Some people also uses
pulse.ebay.com for finding hot niches, but I just use Amazon’s best seller’s list most of the time.
How To Find Niche Markets Within Your Expertise
If you haven’t selected a niche market yet, I would recommend going with niches wherein you have some sort of expertise or experience. This can help you a lot, especially when you’re creating articles and writing content.
It’s easy for me to write about market and keyword research because
I’ve been doing SEO and PPC for several years, but if you would like me
to write about pets or gardening, I won’t be able to create content that
would be appealing with my readers.
That is why, I would always go look for niches within my level of experience and expertise.
A great exercise to help you find profitable niches within your expertise is to check the following:
1.
Family Business – I assume that there is some
sort of informal training between a parent and their children. There
could be tons of niche opportunities within the family business. Maybe
they haven’t use the internet yet to promote their products and
services. Maybe you can create courses and seminars on how to educate
other people who would like to learn more about the business.
2.
Educational Background – What did you study for
in college? university? – As a nurse, my first experience with online
marketing is when I’ve shared my knowledge on test taking skills for
nursing exams. This was my first taste of success in the world of
internet marketing. And the nursing niche has been a money maker for me
ever since. Some of the greatest niches are in the *education niches
(hint hint)
3.
Career Background – Where did you work before?
What are your work experiences? I believe that every work has a hidden
“niche” potential. You have to be extra sensitive on the needs of other
people (client’s and coworkers), and you’ll be able to find some niche
market potentials.
And last but not the least, avoid hunches and gut feeling without data
.
I’m a PPC Specialist so numbers and data matters a lot to me.
If there’s no demand for the product or service that I’m creating,
then I wouldn’t put a lot of time and effort on this niche market.
It’s not unusual that you’ll select niches that you think are profitable but will turn out to be a lemon.
Niche Market Selection is a process, but it can be learned with enough time and practice.
and what I would like to do next, is to help you speed up that learning process.
which brings us to the most important part of Finding Niche Markets
How To Do Market Research And Keyword Research
There is no fixed criteria or formula that determines if a niche
market and keyword research would be profitable or not. If there were,
then a lot of niche marketers would be rich. But what I’ve learned from
many people and what I’ve done for my own niche websites is simple, I
can actually summarize it into 3 steps.
- STEP 1. Find a Specific Market with Specific Needs
- STEP 2. Create the Products or Services that Addresses these specific Needs.
- STEP 3. Promote and Put the Product in front of them (Website, Traffic, Advertising, Promotion, Etc)
That’s my
3 Step Plan to Dominating Niche Markets.
Of course, there are specific details in each step, but that’s the entire overview.
Let me explain it further with an example.
Let’s say you wanted to create a niche website about losing weight and you have a product that can help people lose weight.
If you try to target “everyone” that “wants to lose weight”, you’ll FAIL, big time.
Why?
Because some people are trying to lose weight by…
Surgery
Exercise
Diet
Magic Pills?
Even if your website ranks for keywords like “lose weight” and “lose
fat”, you’ll have High Bounce Rates on your sites and you’ll see that
your site’s conversions will suffer.
So the best way to do market research for a niche market is to identify a specific subset of the bigger market.
I usually start with Age Group – What are the ages of people that I’m targeting?
Gender – Are they mostly male, female or both?
Biggest and Specific Problems – What problems do they have that needs solutions?
Other factors – Do they
have the capability to buy my products or services? Are there
competitors who are willing to advertise their products and services to
these demographic market?
Let’s continue with my example.
If I’m going to promote a product on
losing weight, I’ll choose female, because I believe they are more
interested to losing weight than men.
But we’re not YET done…
I want to target a niche of women who wants to lose weight…
Some ideas that comes into my mind
ladies who wants to lose weight before marriage
girls who wants to lose weight before prom date
women who wants to lose weight after pregnancy
Now depending on your expertise, I’ll most probably choose the niche
on women wanting to lose weight after pregnancy. I think they would fit
my criteria of urgency and capability to invest in my products and
services.
How To Find Niche Keywords and Check if there’s Sufficient Demand (Market) for it
For this part, you’ll need to either Market Samurai or Google Keyword Tool to find the Search Volumes for your Niche Keywords
Remember to use the [Phrase] or [Exact] Match when selecting keywords.
If you choose Broad match, you’ll miss
the REAL search volume of these keywords and your keyword analysis might
give you inaccurate numbers.
Always remember to choose either Phrase or Exact match when finding keywords for your niche website.
You can also use Google Keyword tool to
find Niche keywords, and make sure you still select either [Phrase] or
[Exact] Match when finding keywords.
Notice that I’ve selected long tail
keywords (keywords that have at least 3 words in it) here. I would then
check the SEO Competition of these keywords.
If the
SEO Competition doesn’t look too competitive,
then you can optimize for that keyword. It would be easier for you to
rank keywords that have less competition. This means that you just need a
little bit of promotion in order to rank for these terms.
Long tail keywords may have less search volumes, but they are also
less competitive, allowing me to rank easier for long tail phrases even
if my website is less than 1 year old. It’s also converting a lot higher
because these keywords are very specific. You’ll immediately know what
information the reader wants.
Usually I choose the keyword with the highest search volume as my
“domain name” or “categories”. I don’t disregard any keyword that has
search volume of 100 or more. I would also group keywords together that
are similar in context and meaning.
This will allow me to combine the search volumes of these keywords
giving me more traffic each month, while allowing me to rank faster in
the search engines. This strategy has worked well for this site,
trafficsalad.org as well as my other niche websites.
How to determine the REAL SEO Competition of your Niche Market
The best niche markets are filled with tons of competition, but you
should not worry about this because there are still tons of great angles
and hidden opportunities even in the most difficult niches. But you
also have to be realistic with your time, expertise, and expectations.
You can definitely go after the harder and competitive niches
(internet marketing, losing weight, etc), but you need to be realistic
with how much time and resources you are willing to dedicate in order to
become an authority in your market.
And the way I determine the Search Engine Optimization difficulty of
my niche market is by checking the Top 10 Results of my chosen keywords.
Why? Because the Top 10 results are already ranking for my targeted keyword.
The search engines have rewarded these sites with Top rankings because of the Internal and External Factors these 10 sites have.
The SEO Metrics that I always check includes:
1. Domain Age – The
older the domain, the harder the competition. If you are competing with
10+ year old domains and your site is new, forget this keyword because
they would be very hard to outrank.
2. Backlinks to the Pages and Domain
– Backlinks are still the Biggest reasons why a website ranks in the
search engines. But after the Penguin updates, you have to be careful
with the type of links you point to your websites. Spammy and low
quality links can hurt your website if it triggers a Penguin or
Algorithmic penalty.
3. Index Pages, Referring Domain Count, Meta Data Optimization,etc
– I also check how many pages does my current competitors have, are the
Title and Meta Descriptions optimized, how many referring domains, and
some other less important SEO factors.
I use Market Samurai to Check on the SEO Competition for these
keywords, but before I was using firefox and semrush extension to check
this site metrics one by one.
Going to back our Market Research from the Amazon Bestseller’s list,
I’ll check the Search volume for “waterproof video camera” and “image
stabilized binoculars”
Niche Market Example 1
WATERPROOF VIDEO CAMERA
SEO COMPETITION
Niche Market Example 2
IMAGE STABILIZED BINOCULARS
SEO COMPETITION
Stay tuned as I share more information about Niche Marketing inside my newsletter series
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