Just wasted a ton of money on a so called Niche ?

The term Niche marketing is bandied about by online marketers like it’s the cure for all ills. You can’t turn around in one of those heavily trafficked internet seminars where thousands meet to “find the cure” without running into half a dozen splinter groups discussing the merits/demerits ( but mostly merits ) of tightly focused Niche marketing.

And for the rest of us - What is Niche Marketing ? And why is it so popular?

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

Here is my own quick definition : Niche Marketing is an examination or sales analysis of a very narrow marketing segment that is being under-served by the competition. Let’s see what this looks like.

Marketing to those that - buy running shoes. Niche or not? Not - buy Nike running shoes. Niche or not. Not (What did that surprise you?) - buy marathon capable Nike runners. Niche or not. Uhmm you’re getting warmer. - buy high arched marathon capable Nike runners. Niche or not. Yes absolutely!

This last example sounds like a niche for sure. It has a narrow focus and we have eliminated several wider approaches to our target audience. So, should we run out and stock up on these specialty running shoes in anticipation of the demand?

If you want to lose your shirt go ahead! That was a joke, don’t do it. Please don’t think that I slipped and just told you about my huge money maker and have now decided to take it back. Further from the truth we could not be. We have an unproven premise here.

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…

Was that an inaccurate 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.

Save yourself some time. Don’t try to manually analyze whether or not you think you may have found a niche market product. If you have been in internet marketing or online marketing for some time, its likely that you have used Google’s excellent search engine tools hidden in the adwords product. Perhaps even you have used freekeywords from KeyWordwatcher. Thats how I and many others use to start our search for Niche Market Products - but not any more. These battle tested tools are not nearly enough for this area of internet marketing.

A specialty software tool will use those numbers and up to two dozen or more variables, including rating scores on competition based not only on whether the key words show up in the sites ( which is not necessarily competitive ) but also whether the keywords are in the url, the domain or titles. The same tool might also check for commercial or non-commercial articles for article publishing as well as opening clickbank for affiliate products and opening up other affiliate product searches to verify that there are related affiliate products. And this might be 1/10th of what a commercial niche tool based product might do for you.

Why anyone would want to search for niche products the old manual way is really beyond me. Save yourself some time have a look at a few potential products that you can use. Watch the videos and see what I mean.

One last thing about niche keyword research. There is something called commercial intent. Microsoft’s ad centre has an online program that enables one to determine to some degree whether a searched for phrase has more commercial intent than research behind it.

Tagged with: Marketing

Filed under: Marketing

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!