Niche marketing can be defined as marketing to a subset of a larger market segment. Although the market size will not be very big, the needs of such a market will have the advantage of being much more focused.
There are many ways you can go about running a niche marketing campaign. But online, where the target is usually keywords with low competition in the search engines, you would probably take the following steps:
- Research keywords that a surfer will use to find what they want. Pay attention to those particular keywords which has a good potential for profit and not a lot of competition in the search engine rankings.
- Build a blog or website around those keywords.
- Optimize the content in your blog posts or website pages for the search engines, keeping in mind the keywords targeted.
- Get inbound links to your site or blog by submitting articles to the article directories. In addition, you can also network with other webmasters and get links between your sites or blogs.
- Keep building inbound links until your website ranks at the position you want in Google for your targeted keywords.
I have outlined the basic steps above but you will probably have to mix and match as necessary. Niche marketing is definitely not an exact science and you have to adjust accordingly.
Expected Cost
The only thing that I think you really must pay for is your web hosting and your domain name. A web hosting account that allows multiple domains goes for about $10 a month. A domain name costs about $10 a year, or less than $1 per month.
Other than the obligatory domain name and web hosting, there are some services that can increase your productivity:
- You can choose to write all the content yourself but it is time consuming. If you have the budget, you can consider getting a writer or writers for at least some of your content.
- Submitting your articles to all the various article directories, websites and blogs is time-consuming and probably one of the most boring activities known to man. If you can afford it, you really must get a service that automates the submission.
- Getting other webmasters to exchange links with you would also take up a large portion of your time. There are some services that brings together webmasters interested in link exchanges, and some would even monitor the backlinks resulting from link exchanges for you.
Recommended Skills
A relatively good command of English would definitely be recommended, especially if you intend to write the content and articles yourself. You don't have to be a writer, but you must at least be able to write grammatically correct sentences and be disciplined enough to spell check your work.
When you are starting out, you will be doing a lot of the computer and web related work yourself. You will find yourself installing software, updating your name servers, configuring your web hosting package, and other related stuff. You don't have to be a computer whiz as instructions will be provided, but you do have to be computer literate enough to understand those instructions.
Niche marketing cannot be seen as just a sales job but must be seen in the larger context of a business. And by its very definition, each business is unique. Although I have broken niche marketing into a few simple steps, you must look at those steps as an integrated whole, that is, as a business. As a niche marketer, you are not a salesman but a businessman.
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