Niche Marketing

Just as it's absolutely vital to have a puzzle picture in place while solving a puzzle, carving a niche for your business is an absolute MUST for today's successful Internet business. A niche can be defined as a small targeted and focused area of any business entity that offers a unique program, or benefit, satisfying a common NEED of like-minded people.

Identifying a niche requires a particular mindset. You can't come up with a niche in a flash until you really understand how to go about it. You can only come up with a well-defined niche by having the right attitude towards a concrete, and clear objective.

You need to go through a certain hierarchy in order to find your niche. For example, if you're targeting women in business, your hierarchy may well be drawn something like this... women -> women's health -> pregnancy -> nutritional requirement in pregnancy -> semi liquid food supplement -> finally your product, with a clear and distinct benefit.

Be as specific as possible. Put your entire force towards a single specific value driven business model, rather than getting generalized and trying to sell everything under one roof. In simple terms, by narrowing your business focus you'll effectively broaden sales. You’ll end up making more money this way. And in this way, you will establish yourself as an expert in your field. To be an expert you don't necessarily need to have lot of knowledge or expertise. Needless to say you can get started right away with what you already know or enjoy doing in your spare time, and preferably have a passion for it too. Just try to be a little bit "different" than the rest.

Once you have positioned yourself online as an expert in a specific niche, you will outgrow automatically into more related profitable areas. Your credibility in such areas will carry more weight than if you would attempt to offer "everything under one roof" approach.

Another great benefit of having a narrow niche is the fact that visitors to your site will have a greater interest in what you offer. Why? Because your product or service is highly targeted to them, and you aim to solve their specific problem. What this means is your visitors are pre-qualified with a ready to buy attitude, i.e., they are almost already 50-60% convinced. The rest is your job. Make your Web site simple and attractive with a killer copy, and with useful content that
further persuades them to make a purchase.

It really makes no sense starting or running an Internet business without identifying a niche. If you're really determined to get success on the Net, this is the way to go. Do some positive brainstorming, relate different things around you trying to get into a specific niche, and add value. You will eventually come up with a great idea. And a great idea is the spark for a big explosion.

One Internet marketer started out online with a generalized marketing site that was lucky to get 500 visitors a month regardless of the amount of promotion. Then, he did an in-depth review of HTML compilers for potential ebook self-publishers and the traffic increased substantially! So substantially, in fact, that he began working
exclusively with ebook marketing and created www.ebooksnbytes.com. He then chose complimentary affiliate programs for marketing ebooks, HTML compilers, pricing surveys like the new "Make Your Price Sell," and other ebook-related programs, and all were much more successful at generating sales than from his previous site. Visitors increased from several hundred to almost 10,000 per month in the space of only a few months.

The point I am trying to get across is that by analyzing your own site's statistics, you may notice that you are sitting on a potential gold mine without even realizing it. Which page on your site is getting the most visits? Does it happen to be a page giving away free ebooks or software?

Take an honest look at your own site. Is it unique compared to many other sites out there? Do you have any original and helpful free content to attract visitors? What areas of your site are the most popular? Capitalize on those pages by featuring them or even creating separate domains with those target markets. Whether you will be catering to ezine publishers, web designers, people wanting to lose weight, or even dog breeders, all can be excellent target markets to cater to. Another benefit to niche marketing is that you may end up being ranked high on search engines without much effort since your pages will be specific as well as content-rich.

To summarize: Analyze site traffic... pick your most popular topics and specialize in those areas by building a highly informative site around that specialty. Whether it is golfing, nutritional supplements, ebooks, babies, or even snorkeling... there are affiliate programs and books that you could sell on the side for extra income. Be an expert in a topic you love and know well (or learn as much as you can about it) and then go for it!