Niche Marketing

I’ve mentioned niche marketing in various emails and blog posts. I thought it may be a good idea to talk about the term and concept.

Why?

The term niche marketing can mean different things depending on who’s talking. Usually it refers to submarkets that targeted and sold to.

Niche marketing is effective because you focus in markets that are less competitive. This means that because there is less competition, you should have lower advertising costs and subsequently higher profits.

This can especially be beneficial for those of us who are new to marketing. Niche marketing helps to level the playing field so to speak. You won’t have to compete with folks that have years of experience and the comparable marketing budget.

Right Niche

If you choose the right niche you can build a website, establish yourself as an expert, sell products, and recommend other people’s products through affiliate marketing. Having the right niche can bring a lot of opportunities.

But as niche marketing has become more and more popular, some niches have become really popular. This does present a challenge. Some niches have become as popular as mainstream markets. So we have to be aware of the enormous amount of competition in some niches because it reduces the chance of making a profit.

These include dog training, weight loss, dating, beauty treatments, make money online, etc. Because these are so saturated, the average business marketing to them will not make very much money.

Balance

You may think to go ultra specific. The technical way to do this is to find “long tail” keywords like shih tzu training schools in los angeles” or “acne treatments that work in 2 days”. There a couple of problems with this approach:

• often not enough traffic
• they are so specific that even if you can drive traffic, there isn’t much you can do to serve those folks except show them ads

This approach can be profitable if you know how to do it but as someone starting out, you probably don’t know how…just yet anyways.

There is another approach. You may have heard the phrase “niche down”. To counter the effects of niche markets becoming popular, you can focus on even a small subset of the market but not take it to the extreme.

The key is to find the balance between the two approaches above. And finding the balance also includes analyzing how much potential the niche market has. This isn’t obvious and it takes research and experimentation.

When you hear of folks who have made a lot of money quickly, it’s usually because they found a niche market that has a good balance. Not too popular. Not too specific.

As you continue on your solopreneur journey, you will undoubtedly see that niche marketing can be very profitable if done right.

So tell me: what niche are you focusing on?