Friday, October 30, 2009

Just Wasted A Ton Of Money On A So Called Niche ?

By Trevor Weir

Fast growing amongst the popular terms being thrown around by online marketers is the term Niche Market. It would appear to be dominating their every conversation and for good reason. It is actually where the money is.

So, to the heart of it - what is Niche Marketing ? Is it another of those overhyped terms or does this fad have some legs?

So let's see what its isn't. - It isn't something you can buy - It isn't something you can make ( well not directly ) - It's not a new job opening so don't ask your boss for a transfer - And as usual, the hordes of people taking a stab at it are nearly all probably going to fail.

Niche marketing example

Some would say that the definition of Niche marketing is narrowing down a broader need in the market places until one derives at a much more focused segment that has little or a smaller but reasonable number of competitors.

Marketing to those that buy - runners. Niche or not? Not - Nike runners. Niche or not. Not (What did that surprise you?) - Nike marathon capable running shoes. Niche or not? Feeling the sun yet ? - cpu enhanced marathon capable Nike runners. Niche or no Niche? Jackpot !

So, the warmth of the sun is shining on our face, its going to be a great day. We can now see the light, yaddy yaddy, yaw. So where do we go from here? We have accurately identified a niche right? And isn't that what everyone is talking about? Do we stock up now or wait for Christmas?

Not even! You have heard this street english term before right? No, I am not keeping this niche area for myself, so don't think I am holding back. Truth is, our premise of a niche marketplace sounds good but is unproven.

Don't mistake an example of what the end product might look like with the actual process used to find that niche market. That was NOT the process, in fact, its not even close to the process. While the process can be done manually, you really need a tool since you want to examine and reject tens and tens of potential niches before settling on one to promote. And by the way, even if one of the niche tools highlighted this particular example and a week later 4 friends asked me for the same product I would still have some hesitations...

So, did I just give you a really bad Niche Market example?

It wasn't necessarily a poor example, but the truth is - far more research is required. To start off with, are those actually the keywords that people use to search for this product? In the past, only search engine statistics could tell us that. Then there were great search engine tools that could help further filter that information. But to help determine whether its a great Niche product, even search engine tools like KeyWordwatcher can only go so far.

If we know how many people are searching for the product and how many competing websites there are, isn't this enough information to quantify this as a niche product? Wasn't this what groups traditionally used to make their decision in the past? Well, it was, but it's not enough anymore. There are tools out there now that can make a newbie 10 times more efficient and powerful than the traditional analysis used just 6 months ago.

You may be someone with experience with keyword usage based on several of the great tools out there like KeyWordwatcher or the excellent google adwords tool that gives you exact number of potential clients for broad, phrase and exact searches. Perhaps even you were like me, thinking that I could use those excellent tools to find Niche Market products. Well, you probably can if you have an enormous amount of time, but a total newbie using specific niche software would blow us all out of the water due to the specificity of those tools now.

A software based Niche tool can be an extraordinarily powerful piece of arsenal for someone investigating this area. Most tools gave you competitiveness based on the number of sites that had the keyword in them, but most of us know that our search phrase is already on millions of websites but just a few hundred of those might be competitively attempting to get traffic based on that keyword. A Niche market tool, intuitively understands this and in this specific area searches for keywords in the titles, urls and domain names and comes back with a ranking. It can frequently open clickbank and other affiliate sites with your exact keywords to find affiliate products. Sometimes, these tools also understand article marketing and may directly find you an article for reprint.

Finding Niche Products is now so easy, even a newbie can do it. It does not require the in-depth type of intelligence that former adwords professionals used to use. Follow the links back to the videos. In 2 minutes you will be convinced.

Something new in niche keyword research. Recently there has been a fair amount of research concerning something called commercial intent. Microsoft has an online program that enables one to see if a searched for phrase has stronger commercial intent than research behind it.

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