What is Niche Marketing?

According to Wikipedia -

"A niche market is a focused, targetable portion (subset) of a market sector.

By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. A niche market may be thought of as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.

A distinct niche market usually evolves out of a market niche, where potential demand is not met by any supply.

Such ventures are profitable because of disinterest on the part of large businesses and/or lack of awareness on the part of other small companies. The key to capitalizing on a niche market is to find or develop a market niche that has customers who are accessible, that is growing fast enough, and that is not owned by one established vendor already."

What is a Niche Market?

Simply stated, a niche market is a fairly small group of consumers that have a very specific interest that's not currently being adequately serviced. In most cases, members of a niche market are quite passionate about the topic of their interest. If you can provide a useful product or important information to these people, you're likely to see a large number of new customers.

What is NOT a Niche?

A very generalized topic, such as 'football' is definitely not a niche. If you search Google for the term 'football', you'll see about 194 million competing webpages. Just imagine how difficult it would be to get your website near the top of the search engines with so many others out there that are already firmly positioned!

If you narrow down the scope a bit, let's say to 'football jersey', the competition drops to about 849,000 competing webpages. That's still a lot of competition, but it's only about 0.4% of the competition you'd see with the more generalized term of 'football'. We're definitely headed in the right direction, but we still have some distance to go.

Further narrowing our search to 'custom football jersey' cuts the competition to just 10,100 webpages. Now we have a chance of getting some traffic!

Do people search for Niches?

You bet they do! Of course, niches won't get anywhere near the search volume as the main topic, but the competition is also a lot less intense. Take the football example given above -

search term competitors searches last 30 days

---------------------- ----------- ---------------------

football 194,000,000 284,244

football jersey 849,000 15,179

custom football jersey 10,100 5,131

Can you profit from Niches?

If you put up a webpage with decent Search Engine Optimization (SEO) based upon the keyphrase 'custom football jersey', you shouldn't have too much trouble achieving a high ranking position in the search engines. Out of the 5,131 searches that are done monthly, you stand to get a fair amount of free traffic from the search engines. If you're selling custom football jerseys, that can mean money in your pocket!

Finding the Niches

Although finding profitable niches isn't technically difficult, it is a boring, time consuming and tedious process. First of all, you start out with your main keyword and then try to get more specific, as in the football example above. Keep refining your keyphrase to target successively narrower groups, while comparing the amount of competition with the quantity of searches. When you find a good tight niche with low competition and a fair search volume, there's a good chance you can make money.