Internet Marketing - A Primer On Niche Marketing

Niche marketing can be defined as marketing to a subset of a larger market segment. Although the market size will not be very big, the needs of such a market will have the advantage of being much more focused.

In the online world, niche marketing is primarily concerned with niches in which the search engine competition is low. Normally, you will carry out the following steps:

• Research keywords that a surfer will use to find what they want. Look out for those particular keywords which has a good potential for profit and not a lot of competition in the search engine rankings.

• Build a website to target those keywords.

• Optimize your blog posts, or website pages, for your targeted keywords.

• Get other websites and blogs to link to your website using the usual link building techniques like link exchanges, article submissions, directory submissions, etc.

• Keep building those anchored backlinks until you get to the number one spot in Google, or at least to the top of the first page.

You can do it in many different combinations but the basic steps are listed above.


Cost

In my opinion, you must pay for your domain name and web hosting. They will cost you less than $11 per month. The advantages of paying for those far weighs the small cost incurred.

Other than the obligatory domain name and web hosting, there are some services that can increase your productivity:

• Good content for your blogs, articles and websites is key to your success and, unfortunately, also takes the most time to generate. Paying for articles to be written might be a good investment.

• Submitting your article to the various websites, blogs and article directories will take up a lot of your time as there are hundreds, if not thousands, of them out there. Article submission software, especially those that avoids sending out duplicate content, is well worth the investment.

• Getting other webmasters to exchange links with you would also take up a large portion of your time. There are some services that brings together webmasters interested in link exchanges, and some would even monitor the backlinks resulting from link exchanges for you.

Recommended Skills

A relatively good command of English would definitely be recommended, especially if you intend to write the content and articles yourself. You don't have to be a writer, but you must at least be able to write grammatically correct sentences and be disciplined enough to spell check your work.

There is a lot of computer and web related work to do. On the computer, you might find yourself touching up some graphics, or installing a software application, or even doing some html. On the web, you would probably need to update your name servers and configure your hosting account. You don't need to be an expert to do all these, but some level of computer literacy would be needed.

I have broken down niche marketing into a series of simple steps. But those steps cannot be looked at in isolation. You must look at those steps as part of a business, a niche marketing business. As a niche marketer, you are the boss of your niche marketing business. And the decisions that you make for your business must be made not as the niche marketer but as the boss of the niche marketing business.