What is Niche Marketing? How to Select ideal Niche And Monetise It?
What Are The Benefits Of Niche Marketing?
Niche marketing is not for everyone so it is important that you understand the major advantages before you make the decision to get involved.
1. You can be an Expert
If you focus on a niche market then you can become an expert in it fairly quickly. Maybe you already have knowledge about the niche which your target audience will appreciate and benefit from? To succeed in any niche you do need to know more than your audience, but you can go a lot further than that.
When you are only dealing with a single niche you will have more time to really hone your knowledge. People are always attracted to authority figures and it won’t be long before your target audience are actively searching for you if you play your cards right.
Being the “go to” person in a niche is a real position of power. Your audience will devour your content and will want to interact with you as much as possible. They are far more likely to buy your products and any products that you recommend.
2. Easier to Research a Niche Market
You can’t know everything about everything. It is far better to focus on a single niche than try to be a “jack of all trades”. Researching a single niche means that you can concentrate on the really important things and only gather data about one thing.
One of the most important things for niche marketing success is to know your customer. You need to know the demographics of your niche market and what they want to know.
What desires do your target audience have?
What problems can you solve for them?
Trying to do this for many different markets will require massive effort and time.
3. Create High Ticket Products
Once you have established yourself in your niche and people see you as an expert you can create high ticket digital products to teach them what you know. Let’s say that you have chosen search engine optimization (SEO) as your niche and you have become really good at ranking web pages on the first page of the major search engines.
You can create a high priced training product about how to do SEO properly so that your customers can obtain similar results to you. If the demand is there then you have an excellent opportunity to make a great deal of money.
4. Less Competition and lower Marketing Costs
Niche markets are a lot less competitive than broad markets. This doesn’t mean that there is no competition but it should be a lot easier to rank your content in the search engines for example.
If you plan to use paid advertising for your niche website then the costs can be a lot lower than for broad markets. The size of the market will be a lot smaller so you should be able to reach a large percentage of the market without breaking the bank.
5. Evergreen Niches will make you money long term
If you choose an evergreen niche where there is demand every day of the year then you can make money from this for several years. OK you may have to update things but this is also an opportunity for you to make more profit through the promotion of up to date products.
Finding Products To Sell With Niche Marketing
When you set up a niche marketing website you want to make money from it don’t you? Some people find it really difficult to find good products to offer to their niche market. So here we will give you the lowdown on finding products to sell to your target audience.
Go for Quality and Value
Always think quality. If you recommend a product that has inferior quality then your target audience is not going to trust you going forward. This is a disaster as it can take a lot of time and effort to get your target audience to like you and trust you.
In some niches there are new products launched all of the time. This is especially true in the make money online niche. The problem is that a lot of these products are not high quality and will leave your customers disappointed if they make a purchase based on your recommendation.
Ask any potential product vendor to let you have a sample. If you are promoting digital products then you can ask them for a copy. Explain who you are and that you have a significant following in the niche. If they refuse and you still think that their product is worth recommending then buy it to make sure.
Physical Products
You can either promote physical products and make a commission by being an affiliate for Amazon for example, or you can source and sell your own physical products. If you are an affiliate then check out the reviews for a product before you recommend it. If there are a lot of negative reviews then find something else.
If you want to sell your own products then you can use a website like Alibaba.com to find manufacturers in countries like China. Always request a sample of the product to be sent to you so that you can judge the quality.
There are dropshipping companies who will send products that you promote directly to your customers. It is harder to assess the quality of these products but ask the dropshipping company about this anyway.
Digital Products
If you are in a niche other than make money online then the best place to go for digital product ideas is Clickbank.com. They have digital products in many niches and it is very easy for you to become an affiliate.
When you are looking for different products to promote check out their gravity rating. This is a special rating provided by Clickbank that measures recent sales by affiliates. A product with a high gravity rating will be selling more than one with a lower rating.
Check out the sales pages for any products you are thinking of promoting. Do they look professional? Is the copy persuasive? Would you buy the product? Ask the product vendor for a copy of their product so that you can review it. Otherwise buy the product and check it out for yourself.
If you are in the make money online niche then you can find a lot of products to promote at JVZoo.com and WarriorPlus.com. Both of these websites have best seller lists and you can see what has sold well recently. Again you can ask the vendor for a copy of the product or purchase it yourself to see how good it is.
How To Stand Out With Niche Marketing
Most niche markets worth getting involved with will have a degree of competition and if you want to truly succeed then you need to stand out from the rest. This doesn’t mean that you have to come up with entirely new concepts for interacting with your target audience.
By following the methods outlined below you will have an advantage over others in your market. Succeeding with niche marketing takes time and effort and you need to be willing to accept that. Investing money into your niche marketing business is also required if you want to be at the top of the tree.
Know your Competition
Far too few niche marketers bother to find out who their competition are and what they are doing. These days there are so many online tools and services to help you to do this it is a wonder that more marketers are not taking advantage of this.
If you don’t know who your competitors are and what they are doing in the market then you will be at a severe disadvantage.
You can use online services such as SEM Rush and Similar Web to find out what the strength and weaknesses are of your competitors, the market share that they have, their marketing strategy, what they have done in the past and more.
All of this information will help you to create your marketing plan and help to create better products and services for your target market. Competitive analysis is not something that you do once and then forget about it. Things are always changing so you need to do this as often as you can.
What is your USP?
To really stand out you need a unique selling proposition (USP). This is really about what you stand for in the niche and how you will uniquely help your customers. When you establish this you can easily differentiate from your competitors.
Maybe you can offer the lowest price for similar products or services? Or perhaps you offer the highest quality products and services? Or maybe customers will get additional value from working with you rather than your competitors?
Make Quality your Priority
Make a total commitment to quality with everything that you do. If you are an affiliate then don’t just recommend any products recommend the best products. If you create your own products then make them the very best available and ensure that they provide great value to your customers.
Always add lots of value with your content whether it is on your website, on social media, email marketing or other marketing channel. When you interact with your customers do this in a quality way as well. Respond swiftly to any questions or comments and provide the answers that your audience needs.
Inject your Personality into your Niche Marketing Business
You are human and your customers are too. Tell them your story and how committed you are to serving them and enhancing their lives. People love stories and will connect with you better if you add the human touch into your communications.
Your Customers must come first
There are a lot of niche marketers out there that are just out to make a buck. Customers can see through this and will always prefer you if you have their best interests at heart. Give them value at every turn. Don’t just market to them all of the time.
Monetization Methods For Niche Marketing
Fortunately there are a number of monetization methods for niche websites. Each of these have their advantages and disadvantages which we will discuss in this article. Here are the most common ways of monetizing your niche website:
Google Adsense
With the Google Adsense program you permit Google to display ads on your website and when your visitors click on them then you will earn a commission. At best Adsense will bring you in a bit of money that you can invest in marketing your website or to help with some of the other costs. It will not make you rich.
It is easy to sign up for an Adsense account and place the ads on your website. One thing that you need to realize is that when someone clicks on a Google ad they will leave your website and go to another one associated with the ad. This is the biggest drawback with the Adsense program.
Affiliate Marketing
When you are an affiliate you will promote products and services created and owned by others and receive a commission for doing this. Commission rates can be as low as 4% for physical products and as high as 100% for digital products.
Some affiliate networks make it easy for you to become an affiliate. To become a Clickbank affiliate all you need to do is fill out a simple form and you are good to go. The Amazon Associate program is a bit more challenging as you will need to tell them about your tax situation but it is still fairly easy.
Other affiliate networks make it more difficult. With some you will need to convince them that your niche website is good, meets their traffic thresholds and explain your marketing plan to them. Sometimes you will need the vendor’s individual permission to promote their products and services.
Affiliate marketing does work for niche websites and you have the potential to make a lot more money than you will with Google Adsense. The biggest drawback is that you have to make sales to earn money.
CPA (Cost Per Action) Offers
If you are not familiar with CPA then it is different to affiliate marketing in that usually a sale isn’t necessary to make a commission. A visitor to your website that sees the CPA offer will just need to complete an action such as add their email address to a form or their zip code.
There are lots of CPA offers around and finding some for your niche should be quite straight forward. The biggest problem with CPA marketing is that the CPA networks are very choosy about who they will accept.
Create and Sell your Own Products
When you create and sell your own products you will keep all of the revenue that you generate from selling via your website. You will also keep the customer as well unlike when you are an affiliate marketer.
Having your own products will further enhance your reputation as an expert in the niche. The biggest problem with creating your own products is the time, effort and money that it takes. It is best to see this as an investment as you will want to make sales for a considerable time.
You can outsource elements of your product (or all of it) if you want to.
Examples of your own products could be a guide in PDF format or a series of training videos.
Niche Marketing And SEO
When can you get the best quality, targeted traffic for your niche website? From search engines of course! When someone uses a search term (keyword) that is related to your niche they are trying to find information and answers to questions that you can help them with. So you need to get in front of this targeted traffic.
Search engine traffic is of the highest quality. People don’t search for “the best laptop for under $1,000” without having the intent to find and purchase such a laptop. So it is essential that you do everything that you can to rank your web pages as high as you can on Google and the other major search engines.
It all starts with Keyword Research
Before you even begin to setup your niche website you need to perform comprehensive keyword research. There are many tools available for this and you can outsource the work if you don’t want to do it yourself.
Keyword research is not that difficult. You can use the free Google Keyword Planner, enter a seed keyword for your niche e.g. “budget laptops” and then see what related keyword suggestions are returned. It is usually fairly easy to find hundreds of keyword ideas in a couple of hours.
You can then organize your niche website and your content around the keywords you find. With WordPress you can easily set up different categories for different keyword groups. When you create posts for your website use your keywords in them to maximize your chances of good search engine rankings.
On Site Optimization
SEO has two major elements which are on site and off site optimization. You are in complete control of on site optimization as the owner of your website. Make sure that your website has the best structure for SEO and that all of your content is SEO optimized.
Create your content around your keywords. Determine what your main keywords are and find related keywords. Use your main keyword in the title of your posts. Use it again in the body text and mention the related keywords at least once. Don’t go too crazy with keywords otherwise you can be penalized for “keyword stuffing”.
You need to make your keywords blend in naturally with your content. Never write content just for search engines. Write for your readers and integrate the keywords in a natural way. With a bit of practice you will soon get the hang of this.
Off Site Optimization
This is about other websites linking to your content. Each link is a “backlink” and you need to get as many high quality backlinks as you can to your website. When your content is good this will happen naturally but you can always give this a boost by creating your own high quality backlinks.
There are service providers who are experts in SEO that can do this for you. Be sure to check out reviews before you go ahead with any of these SEO service providers. Or you can learn about SEO and do it yourself.
SEO is your Long Term Traffic Strategy
Ranking as much content in the search engines over the long term should be your aim if you want to be successful with niche marketing. It may cost you money to begin with but if you have a good website that makes you money then the returns should be worth the effort and expense.
You Need To Avoid These Niche Marketing Mistakes
Niche marketing is popular among the Internet marketing crowd but many of them make a lot of mistakes with it and then claim that it doesn’t work. Well niche marketing does work you just need to do it properly and avoid common mistakes which we will discuss here.
The most common mistake is to choose the wrong niche so please learn from the following:
1. Don’t Choose a Niche based on Products
This is a classic mistake. You come across a product that looks good and you can make a lot of money as an affiliate with it. You decide to create a website around this product. This is not a niche marketing website.
Niche websites solve problems for people in the niche. Products change all of the time and if you create a website around a specific product then it can soon become obsolete. Be committed to solving problems instead. You can then find products that will help to do this where you can make money.
2. Following your Passion
How many times have you heard the advice to follow your passions when it comes to niche marketing? It seems like every product on the subject recommends this. OK it makes sense to do something that you are interested in but you will soon lose interest if you are not making money won’t you?
You do not have to be really passionate about a niche to succeed in it. It is possible to develop an interest in a niche and be successful. If you choose a niche that you know will bore you or goes against the grain in some way then you will fail.
3. Not Validating a Niche
Some people will just start to work in a niche because they just think that it’s a good idea or someone else recommended it to them. This is not a good thing to do and you will be totally relying on luck which is not the best strategy.
You need to check that a niche idea has the demand and that people in the niche are spending money. If either one of these is not there then your chances of success or minimal to none. Take the time to validate your niche ideas.
4. Trying to find an Easy Niche
What a dream – a sizeable niche where people are spending money and there is little or no competition. Maybe one or two of these niches do exist but it really isn’t worth trying to find them. There are no new niches.
Competition in a niche tells you that there is demand and people are spending money. If a niche has no competition then run a mile. People have probably tried to make money from it before you and failed.
5. Believing you have to be an Expert
This is a common mistake that a lot of online marketers make when they are trying to choose a niche. If a niche idea looks good from a market size and commercial intent point of view they dismiss the niche because they believe they need expertise in the niche to succeed.
You don’t need expertise to succeed. Yes you do need to know something about the niche but just more than your target audience knows which is usually not that much. Don’t dismiss a niche idea because you need to learn about it.
Niche Marketing Myths You Need To Know About
Over the years there has been a lot of negativity around niche marketing. A lot of online marketers have tried to do it and failed and a number of myths have emerged. You need to know about these niche marketing myths and why they are not true.
1. You can Make Money Fast and Easy with Niche Marketing
You may have seen products around niche marketing sold on the premise that is is a fast and easy way to make money online. This is not true. There are many different ways to make money on the Internet and some are faster than others and some are easier.
If niche marketing was so fast and easy then everyone would be successful with it wouldn’t they?
Never go into niche marketing expecting to make a fortune overnight. It’s not going to happen. It takes time and effort to choose the right niche. OK setting up a WordPress website is fairly quick and simple but then you have to populate it with high quality content and drive targeted traffic.
2. There are no Profitable Niches because they are all Saturated
You will probably see this myth about niche marketing more than any other. Even the most experienced online marketers believe this. It is not true and a niche can never be saturated. It just doesn’t make sense.
Yes some niches are very competitive but that doesn’t mean that they are saturated. Competition is a good thing as it shows that there is demand and people will spend money in the niche.
3. The only Profitable Niche is Make Money Online
This niche marketing myth is a bit more believable but still untrue. Yes you can make a profit in the make money online niche but you can make great profits in other niches too. In fact it is often easier to profit in other niches than it is in MMO.
There are many examples of people making great profits in niches such as parenting, wedding advice, relationship advice, health and fitness, finance, babies and children, finding jobs and resumes and many more. Just take a look on Flippa.com to see websites in many different niches selling well.
4. Expertise is required to succeed in a Niche
This is another popular myth about niche marketing. You have to be an expert to make money. This is definitely not true. Nobody knows everything about a niche and there is definitely scope for you to become knowledgeable in a niche fairly quickly.
It’s as easy as knowing a bit more than your target audience. This happens in conventional offline business every day and it works online too. The fact is that if you study a niche for a few hours then you are going to know more about it than most people do.
5. You need Technical Skills to succeed with Niche Marketing
This is absolutely ridiculous but something that pops up fairly often. A few years ago there would be some truth to this but these days everything is so easy and you don’t need any technical skills to succeed with niche marketing.
You can purchase a domain name and hosting and then install WordPress with one click of your mouse. If you want to modify your theme and don’t know any HTML or CSS then just find someone to do it on Fiverr.com for a few bucks.
How To Research A Profitable Niche Market
If you want to succeed in niche marketing then you need to do a lot of research before you choose a niche. Making the wrong choice of niche can be a total disaster and can lead you to give up because you can’t make any money from it. So follow these steps to research a profitable niche market.
1. Keyword Research
Most online marketers either ignore keyword research or do it half heartedly. This is a big mistake. Knowing what search terms your niche audience uses to find answers to their problems is very valuable and it is easy to find this out.
By using the free Google Keyword Planner you can find lots of keywords related to your niche and also the estimated search volumes which is a good indication of the size of the niche market.
It is really easy to use the Google Keyword Planner. All you need to do is to enter a seed keyword and then you will automatically receive other related keywords for the niche. You will also discover the average cost per click for PPC advertising using Google Adwords and the competition for ads around individual keywords.
You can export lists of keywords very easily with the Google Keyword Planner and create a master spreadsheet with all of the keywords in it. Then you can go through them all and decide which ones to use.
2. Know the Niche Audience
If you are interested in a particular niche idea then find out as much as you can about the audience. You want to know what problems they are having and what interests them the most. It is all about understanding their needs as much as possible.
When you know your audience well you have a lot more chance of succeeding with the niche. You can publish content that will resonate with them and make offers for products and services that will solve their problems.
3. How Competitive is the Niche?
You need to determine how competitive the niche is that you are considering. Whether you will drive traffic using paid ads, SEO or social media (or a combination of them all) it is important that you know what you are up against.
The Google Keyword Planner will tell you the ad competition for Google Adwords and the average cost per click. Analyzing how difficult it will be to rank in the search engines for specific keywords is not so easy but there are services and tools available to help you with this.
4. Look at Trends
Using a tool like Google Trends will tell you whether there is steady demand for a specific keyword or whether there are extreme peaks and troughs. It will also show you if the demand is going up or tapering off.
There are other ways to look at trends too. With most social media platforms you can see the trends for keywords or “hashtags” and again you will discover if there are upward or downward trends. This is definitely worth doing when you are considering a niche idea.
5. Is the Niche right for you?
This is not a method of research but it is still important. Do you feel comfortable operating in a specific niche? Is it something that you can be interested in and even passionate about? If the idea of entering a niche leads to negative thoughts about it then move on to another niche idea.
Reverse Engineering Your Way To Niche Marketing Success
If you have competitors in your niche, which is very likely, then you can learn a lot from them and even steal their ideas (legally) so that you can be on the same playing field.
Why not let your competitors do all of the work for you and then do the same as them?
Everyone that starts a niche marketing business has the same problems. They need to create an attractive website and drive targeted traffic to it. They need to convince their visitors that they have the best content and all of the answers that they need to solve their problems.
So what can you do about this?
Others were there before you
When you enter a new niche market there are always going to be other people that got into the market before you did. They will have had to overcome all of the problems that you now face to establish tem in the market.
Your competitors will have come up with solutions to these problems and this is excellent news for you. Rather than have to tackle the problems alone you can reverse engineer their website and their marketing to see what they have done.
Look to Improve on what your Competitors have done
We would never condone you stealing all of your competitor’s ideas. What you can do is look to see what they have done and think about how you could improve on this in your own niche marketing business. By doing this you can offer the same target audience a better experience than your competitors are currently offering.
Think about this for a minute. Your competitor’s will have spent time, effort and money creating their website, their content plan and their marketing plan. When you reverse engineer what they have done there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. All you need to do is think about how you can do it better.
What Content are they providing?
You can look at all of the content on your competitor’s website. What kind of subjects are they discussing? How are they providing value to their visitors? If they have an email list then sign up for it to see what kind of email content they are sending out.
It will be easy for you to find the associated social media accounts. Usually your competitor will publish these links on their website. Take a good look at all of their social accounts and see what their engagement level is. Do people share their posts and make comments? How does your competitor respond to comments?
What kinds of posts do your competitors make on social media platforms? Look for posts that have generated the most engagement and plan to provide similar posts on your social media accounts.
Do your competitors use Google Adwords, Bing Ads or Facebook Ads to promote their website? If so how do their ads read? Can you learn from this and do it better? What is their Facebook page like? Do they belong to any groups or maybe have their own group?
Reverse Engineering is a Legitimate Shortcut
Never be concerned about reverse engineering what your competitors are doing. If you were in their position they would reverse engineer your website and marketing in a heartbeat. You will need a keen eye for detail while you are looking at what your competitors are doing. But as long as you don’t copy them it will not be a problem.
