Niche Marketing - The Basics

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.

There are many ways you can go about running a niche marketing campaign. But online, where the target is usually keywords with low competition in the search engines, you would probably take 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 blog or website around those keywords.

* Use on-page SEO techniques to optimize the website for the 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 outlined above.

Cost

The only thing that I think you really must pay for is your web hosting and your domain name. A web hosting account that allows multiple domains goes for about $10 a month. A domain name costs about $10 a year, or less than $1 per month.

There are other services you might want to consider spending money on as they will increase your productivity, and in the long run, give you a better return on the time you spent:

* Paid writers for your articles, websites and blogs. You can look for them at job sites like eLance.

* 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.

* Services that reduces the time it takes to get good anchored backlinks to your site.

Skills Required

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.

You will need to tinker with name servers and web hosting accounts to get your website or blog up and running. Some changes in the web templates supplied might also be needed, or you might even want to design your own. Instructions will be provided or can be googled, but you do have to be computer literate enough to understand and carry them out.

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.