When I first started researching affiliate marketing I came across this phrase ‘niche marketing’ time and time again. I was fascinated by how much information there was on the topic and how there was a great potential for making money based on finding a good niche. Niche affiliate marketing has become a huge and very competitive business over the past 5 years. It seems every entrepreneur and his dog wants a piece or niche of the market.
The good news is that online spending is still increasing even in the global economic downturn of the past few years, and there are plenty of niches to target for everyone.
Niche marketing is about targeting a very specific part of the market with a service or product. Whether it is online or offline, a market niche is a very precise space in the market that involves a single or very small range of products to cater for a very specific want or need. An example of this would be that you want to market some sort of product or literature related to dieting. This is a very broad category that would have huge amount of competition and not specific enough to focus on a product or product range.
So you would look at specific types of diet, say high protein/low carbohydrate diets rather than diets in general. You could take this even further and see if there are specific brand name popular types of diet that fall within this category.
As you can see, niche marketing looks to answer a specific need and also gives you a much smaller and therefore less competitive market to sell to. One of the great benefits of niche marketing is finding a niche that has not received much marketing attention and therefore has a lot of potential.
There are many aspects to marketing and it is a good to realize that this covers a diverse range of areas. One aspect is how we relate to our customers, if we do at all. Unfortunately, due to the nature of Internet marketing our relationship with potential customers can be quite anonymous. This can divorce us from a sense of what customers might want and this will impact on our success with how we appeal to customers to purchase a product. We are not just trying to sell a product in a certain niche of the market; we are trying to sell it to a real person who is interested in buying any number of products for any number of reasons.
We want to help people see the qualities of the product and so encourage confidence in what it can give them, so they feel happy about making a purchase.
Listed below are some strategies to get you started as a niche marketer.
1. What Is Your Interest
The niche market that you choose will to some extent be impacted by your own interests and knowledge. After all, you are going to have to market a product or product range, build an informative website around it with good content, and convince your prospective buyers of its value and quality. It is going to be a hard slog and an unconvincing sales campaign if you are not emotionally involved somehow in your product.
2. Ideas For A Niche
Based on your interests you should determine what type of products or services you might be able to sell. Write some ideas down and use a search engine or directories like DMOZ.org to expand out your ideas. You can check out Amazon, ClickBank and other affiliate programs to see what sort of products they have that fall in your area of interest
3. Keyword Research
This step really goes hand in hand with the last step. This is where you are going to really hone your skills for working out what is a good market; in fact a large part of niche affiliate marketing is done at this stage. Part of keyword research is working out how much demand there is for your niche versus how much competition you will have.
There are many resources online to accomplish this, one of which is the Google AdWords Keyword tool. This helps you to search on keyword phrases and see how many global monthly searches are made on it. You can also use a search engine to see how many search results there are for that particular keyword phrase. The basic idea is to aim towards lower search results in relation to number of searches carried out per month.
4. Product/Competition Research
Once you have found a prospective niche, it’s time to start doing some more research into your competition and how they are selling their products. This will help broaden out your perspective on the market and how to approach it, particularly in your early days of marketing. You are trying to get to know your product and your market back to front. If you want to be a successful marketer you have to live and breathe it. This point feeds back into our first point which is about being interested in your product and market.
5. Create Your Own Brand
This is important if you are going to stand out from all the rest of the marketers out there that you are in direct competition with. This is often referred to as creating a Unique Selling Position (USP). How to create a USP is not easy to explain but is something that you can get a sense of from how others have created it in their own campaign. Again this is where the research and immersing yourself in the marketing game can really help you to excel.
6. Create Your Website
With all your preparation done you now need to create a website to present your product to the world. Your site will need several pages to have a complete and professional look about it. This is a very important stage of your marketing campaign. You are not trying to do the minimum work to get away with selling a product or getting a few page impressions.
You see this a lot on the Internet, web pages that have been slapped together with a bunch of AdSense units and a bit of sloppily written content. This just doesn’t really work. Putting in the extra effort to create a truly valuable website resource that is aesthetically pleasing will serve you much better in the long run, and has a far greater potential for income generation.
Niche affiliate marketing is all about preparation and research. These are the main stays of your practice in finding your marketing niche. These skills will improve over time, expect to make mistakes and use them as learning experiences and see the value in them. And don’t give up!
