As Internet marketing evolves, you’ll find it more difficult to remain at the top of your markets. More competition means that you’ll be working harder and probably making less money for your efforts. Working harder for less money doesn’t sound too appealing, does it?
We’ve all seen the hyped up ads -
– Work Only 15 Minutes a Day and Make Thousands of Dollars Every Week!
– Secret Ebook Reveals Easy Path to Wealth Without Work!
– Promote This Product and Make Millions!
– Sign Up for Free and Make Money Today!
Although the ads paint a bright picture of the good life, those things never worked for me or anyone I know. If there is some ‘magic button’ that brings instant wealth, I’ve never been able to find it. But there is a way to drastically improve your bottom line, while minimizing your investment of time and money. It’s called Niche Marketing.
What exactly is Niche Marketing?
Niche marketing is the process of finding a small segment of the market that’s highly focused and presenting that market with the exact product they’re looking for. By a small segment, I’m referring to a group of prospects that has a special interest that’s probably not currently being addressed by most marketers.
Let’s say for example that you want to sell car insurance. If you go to google and search for car insurance, you’ll see there are over 150 million webpages that you’ll be competing with, so your chances of making money in that market don’t look too promising. However, if you narrow your search down to “car insurance for teenagers with bad driving records”, there are zero webpages, so there’s virtually no competition!
Do you think there are many teenagers that have bad driving records? You betcha! And do you think those types of drivers end up paying high premiums? You betcha! Do you think there’s easy money to be made in such a lucrative market that has little or no competition? You betcha!
Of course, car insurance is just being used as an example and you may be involved in an entirely different business altogether. But the basic idea of niche marketing can be applied just about everywhere.
Suppose you want to be an affiliate marketer. You can open a free account at Commission Junction, LinkShare, ClickBank or countless other affiliate related sites. Then you’ll be able to choose from thousands of different products that you can start marketing right away. And since you’ll be an affiliate, you won’t have to bother with creating a product, shipping, credit card processing or customer service. All that will be handled directly by the product vendor, so you can concentrate strictly on marketing – and that’s where you’ll make your money.
Now that you have the general idea of what niche marketing is, how it works and how it can make you money, you’ll need to locate a potential niche market and provide that market with just the type of product they desperately want.
Finding Niche Markets -
There are several places you can look to discover niche markets. You could visit Dummies.com – that’s the publisher that produces all those top selling ‘For Dummies’ books. They’ve already uncovered lots of hot niches for you. Just browse thru their book selections and you should be able to come up with several good niche marketing ideas.
You can also check pulse.ebay.com to see the current top ten sellers, so you can see what’s selling now. Be sure to also look at the top sellers at Amazon for even more ideas.
Once you’ve found an interesting niche market, look thru the affiliate products available at ClickBank, Amazon or whatever affiliate site you’ve signed up for. When you find a good product match, checkout the product sales page to make sure it does a good job of selling the product.
Next, search thru google and see how much competition there is. You’ll want to enter markets where the competition isn’t too fierce, so you’ll have a better chance for success.
Exploiting Niche Markets -
When you’ve decided upon a particular niche market and you’ve found a good product match that doesn’t have too much competition, you’ll need to use Pay-Per-Click(PPC) or some other form of advertising to get prospects to the sales page, thru your affiliate link of course. PPC is a good choice because of fast results – you can start generating traffic within minutes of placing an ad, so you’ll quickly know if you’ve chosen a good niche.
When placing PPC ads, you’ll want to make sure that you use the proper keywords to attract the niche market you’re targeting. There are free online keyword tools you can use, as well as specialized software you can purchase to help with this task. With proper keyword selection for your PPC campaigns, you’ll be able to attract genuinely interested prospects while keeping your click cost as low as possible.
The real beauty of niche marketing is it’s so targeted that you’ll be offering just the right product to the prospects that are in desperate need, so when they look at your ad or sales page, they’re already half-sold right from the beginning!
Automate the Process -
Finding niche markets can really pay off, but you may not want to take the time to find those markets manually. This is a great time to put your PC to work – let it find those lucrative niches for you. With the right software, you can automate the somewhat tedious process while you concentrate on other aspects of running your business!
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