I was out trying to help our local boat shop owner meet his quota for bass boat sales when I ran into my friend Ned the Newbie, well his real name is Gary but he is really interested in online marketing and has been learning a little more each time we meet. He also reminds of Ned from the Simpson's cartoon because he is so bubbly and eager to please.
So I stopped drooling long enough to say hello and to see how his Internet marketing strategies research was doing since we last met. As usual Ned was all excited about something and wouldn't let me get a word out before he was asking questions.
Read about our last meeting at: http://www.inetstrategiesinc.com/articles/ned-the-newbie.html
Ned is trying to learn so much about Internet marketing that he is getting himself confused and frustrated, but he is determined to earn a living from the Internet. He just needs to learn to slow down, take baby steps and maybe even relax a bit. But that wouldn't be Ned, would it.
The question on the tip of Ned's tongue was "What is Niche Marketing and can I make more money with it than I can with Internet marketing?"
This wasn't a question I was going to answer right there so I invited Ned back to my office where I would be able to show him examples plus I was a little distracted by the boats and I don't like being distracted from business and Ned was fine with that.
Ned was waiting for me when I arrived back home, and as usual before I could even say hello he was asking questions. Although his first question was to ask if I had purchased the bass boat I was drooling over.
Once we settled in I opened my browser, handed Ned my keyboard, along with a note pad and pen, then asked him to go to Google.com and search for: "what is niche marketing?", using the quotes in this case. After only 2 seconds Ned had the following definitions.
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Definitions of Niche Marketing on the Web (from Google.com):
Niche marketing is the process of finding small but potentially profitable market segments and designing custom-made products for them. Niche marketers are often reliant on the loyalty business model to maintain a profitable volume of sales.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_marketing
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Ned's face was a little red as he admitted how easy it was to find that answer to what niche marketing is.
Learning how to use a search engine to find, or better yet, research market themes and topics is extremely important to any online business, so take the time to read the Advanced Serch Help for the search engines you use.
Because I am so fanatical about fishing let's look at fishing as the keyword for our market study.
Use Google.com to search for results on the keyword fishing. How many did you find? 100 million, okay I would say fishing might just be a little too general, so let's be more specific by looking up "bass fishing".
Be sure to use the quotation marks so that you are finding results that have 'bass fishing' as a phrase, rather that two words any where on the page. That can be important for contextual reasons.
That narrowed our search from 100 million to just 3 million. Okay, that is still a lot of pages out there competing for that phrase, but don't give up quite yet.
How about getting a localized a bit. Let's add our local area into the search criteria. This time use a plus sign before the quotes that hold New Brunswick. You search text should look like:
"bass fishing" +"New Brunswick"
Now you have narrowed your market down until you are only competing with 40,000 pages. That is a little more do-able at this point in your marketing experience. After you have your foot in the fishing market door for your niche and you have started earning an income, you can start moving into other niches within the general fishing market to generate more sources of income.
Let's take a few minutes and use a couple of research tools that will help you understand Niche marketing a little better.
Two very useful tools are http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ and https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox. These tools are really made for paid search engine campaigns, but they will give you an idea of the best keywords and phrases that make for a good niche market.
http://www.goodkeywords.com/ - You could also try a freeware Good KeyWords, which can be downloaded by clicking the link, to choose targeted keywords.
http://our.affiliatetracking.net/wordtracker/a/14875 - I recommend WordTracker's database of terms that are actually used on the major search engines and is the most complete and dependable keyword phrases suggestion tool. WordTracker draws their information from most of the major search engines.
Let's take a look at the Overture Suggestion Tool and see how many requests there are for these phrases. It is kind of important to have enough people that want what you have in order for you to earn a living from your online business.
Start with the keyword 'fishing' just like we did when we were using Google.com.
Overture says 280,000 searches were made for this phrase over the past three months. Cool, you could make lots of money there, all you have to do is sail past all those millions of other pages out there trying to compete with this term. So let's look at the list and see what we can gleen from it.
280730 fishing 34156 fishing trip alaska 22113 fishing lure
113665 fly fishing 32640 fishing trip 21853 fishing gear
108583 archery fishing hunting 31267 fly fishing vacation
19789 alaska fishing 45136 fishing boat 30419 bass fishing
16141 cat fishing 45011 fishing vacation 28874 fishing rods
15814 fishing report 38952 canada fishing 28684 deep sea fishing
14538 trout fishing 37699 alaska salmon fishing
25332 fishing tackle 13961 lake fishing
If we use the same tool and search for 'bass fishing' instead of 'fishing' we will get a tighter market and one that would be a little easier to break into, although 'bass fishing' is still a huge market.
30419 bass fishing 1135 bass fishing striped 700 bass fishing trip
5069 bass fishing home page 911 bass fishing mexico 639 bass fall fishing
2181 bass fishing tip 903 bass fishing smallmouth 592 bass fishing tackle
1839 bass fishing lure 834 bass fishing fly 538 bass fishing free game
1727 bass fishing report 828 bass boat fishing 516 bass fishing pro
1620 bass fishing peacock 816 bass fishing game 468 bass fishing picture
1584 bass fishing florida 762 bass fishing tournament 459 bass fishing technique
Now if you were to use this same tool and specify a location also you would have narrowed your market into an even tighter Niche market. Think about it this way. If you decided to get into Internet marketing and you tried to marketing to everyone you would be so general that you would most likely reach no one, but...
... if you break that 'far too general' market of fishing into smaller groups you can be far more focused on your niche market target group and will stand a much better chance of succeeding.
James Mann, owner/webmaster iNET Strategies Inc.
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