Niche Marketing – The Basics
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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:
* Do your keyword research to identify keywords that has the most potential and the least competition. Keywords are words or phrases that a surfer uses to search for their area of interest.
* Build a website or blog for Adsense revenue or revenue from other ad networks. You can also aim to sell your own or affiliate products.
* Use on-page SEO techniques to optimize the website for the targeted keywords.
* Get inbound links to your site or blog by submitting articles to the article directories. In addition, you can also network with other webmasters and get links between your sites or blogs.
* Keep building inbound links until your website ranks at the position you want in Google for your targeted keywords.
You can do it in many different combinations but the basic steps are outlined above.
Investment Needed
Your own domain name and your own web host are two things that you really must pay for. A domain name will set you back less than $1 per month while a web hosting account would cost about $10 per month. If you pay for nothing else, you must pay for this.
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.
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.
Niche marketing is not a job but a business. And in any business, a spirit of entrepreneurship would be needed. While I have broken down the marketing process into a few simple steps, the details of how to implement each step varies for different people, different websites, different keywords, etc. Each niche also presents unique challenges that you, as the entrepreneur, must meet.
