One of the most magnificent qualities of the Internet is that, by bringing the world close together, it enables people who fill one tiny corner of interest to come together, marketing to each other, sharing ideas, and growing as a niche community. For instance, consider antique marble collecting. I don't know many people who collect antique marbles. But if I do a search online, I can find dozens of sites that specialize in it, many with excellent information on their sites, places to trade and sell my antique marbles, and tools with which to make my own marbles.



How can you leverage the enormous power of niche marketing?

The best way is by providing your web site with great content focused directly at these niche markets. Instead of selling to the masses who are interested in Bono and Coca-cola, sell to those who are hungry for information and resources concerning their special interest.

In order to do this, you must identify yourself as an expert in the field you're targeting.

Becoming A Guru

Gurus are the wise men who sit on the mountains, dispensing advice. You don't have to sit on a mountain but you do need to dispense advice if you're going to be a guru. This means you should know what you're talking about.

Online, degrees and education don't mean as much as the information you can prove you have. The way you prove your knowledge online is by supplying your website, whether it's a sales website or a networking one, with great, original, valuable content.

This is great news for anyone who writes well. Despite its promotion as a great image-based medium, the Internet is primarily a text-based medium. It delivers pictures, music, and video very well indeed, but most information today is contained in text, and the search engines that catalog your website deal in text as well (even the image-based search engines focus on the titles and descriptive text you assign to your pictures and video).

But what if you know your niche market, but don't write well? There's a solution for that too. You can purchase content others have written for you, or you can have content custom-written for your niche market.

Finding Great Content

There are numerous great places to find content online to add to your website, and – better yet – you can get the content for free.

Or so it would seem.

Sites like GoArticles and Idea Marketers are known as article directories. They provide the service of matching well-written, informative content with webmasters who desperately need it. The articles are free for the taking, with the caveat that if you display one on your website, you must also cite the article's author and link to his or her website.

Well, free isn't always free. And in this case, when you're trying to establish yourself as a knowledgeable expert in a niche market, it's likely to undermine your entire purpose. When you list someone else as the author of an informative article on your website, you're setting that other person up as the guru on your website. And you're even providing this competing guru with the ultimate marketing tool – a link to his or her website when they've just interested the customer with an excellent piece of information.

Instead of using article directories, you're better off running articles on your website that you can claim as your own. You want articles ghostwritten for you, and the way to obtain them is to go to article brokers. These companies deal with private label articles, content that you can claim as your own because all rights to the article have been sold by the author. Instead of advertising someone else as the guru, you've just shown your customers that you, yourself, are the knowledgeable one.

Articles, Newsletters, and Ebooks

Private label articles can be used either as individual articles or content on your website, or they can be used to build newsletters that you can send out to subscribers. If you get a nice collection of articles, you can even create ebooks to sell or give away to your customers as reference sources. All of these purposes are valid and intelligent ways to use private label articles, and any of them will drive business to, not away from, your website.