I’ve been receiving a few emails after my recent posts with people saying that it’s all well and good to say that one needs a niche to promote and stick to, but how exactly does one embark on this niche marketing journey to begin with?

How does one find a niche to start with?

That..

.. is a very good question, to say the least..

…. and the answer is even simpler to provide, so here it is.

It takes effort, constant research and some pure..

.. common

…. sense.

Niche marketing is where it’s all at – as one of my seasoned niche marketer colleagues always says.

Finding a niche isn’t exactly very hard if you’re determined to put in the hours worth of surveying, researching, reading and pondering.

You see,

To be able to find a niche means you’ve essentially tapped into an area of high demand and relatively low supply – People are asking for something they cannot easily find or do find but have something to complain about that leads them to seek alternatives and exhibit demand once again.

To be successful in niche marketing, to be able to pick the right niche..

.. you need to first do some extensive keyword research – What are people searching about and which of those keywords has fairly low competition in the form of SEO’ers or PPC Advertisers on search engines.

Now,

Let me clear something up right away.

Niche marketing is NOT about finding that ONE golden keyword that makes or breaks your campaign.

I see way too many internet marketers finding one or two keywords that they feel will bring them riches overnight – considering them their “niche”, but the reality of the matter is that those two keywords can’t possibly do the entire “niche” much justice because everyone is different – people’s minds work differently and in several eccentric ways when they are searching for something on Google, Yahoo! or Bing.

You can’t expect EVERYONE to use the same keyword or two to search for a particular product or piece of information – Even if you think along lines of “broad” keywords and assume that using a broad keyword like say “weight loss” will “cover” everything far and between that has anything at all to do with weight loss, and that you’re quite well off adopting this strategy. That’s not true and there is more to selecting a “niche” than simply selecting one or two major keywords that “define” the niche.

Enough with the bashing, so let’s just start off with how you can easily find your first niche to stay in, learn and promote over time:

1. Visit the Free Videos & Blog Posts at The Internet Time Machine (http://theinternettimemachine.com) – This is not an affiliate link, you are only being asked to visit the wealth of free information available on the website that will let you make your decision regarding that first niche, a much easier, more mentally peaceful process 🙂

2. There are several hot and trending niche marketing avenues discussed in those resources that high demand and little to no advertiser competition. Pick one and proceed to do the remaining steps.

3. Visit WordTracker.com – This is my favourite Keyword Research Tool as it allows anyone to access “qualified” searches for keywords that are taking place on search engines and not simply “bot” searches – of which there are hundreds of thousands every month that don’t really do anyone’s keyword research any justice with the flawed data that comes about as a result of bot-like activity on search engines.

4. Insider WordTracker, enter your keywords for the niche you selected in step 2. In this case for example, let’s say you selected “pregnancy diabetes” as your niche

5. Now, pregnancy diabetes is a HUGE niche market on its own and you would be committing niche marketing suicide if you went after just the broad keyword “pregnancy diabetes”. While in WordTracker, enter pregnancy diabetes in the keyword search box and see what keywords WordTracker has to offer.

6. You will notice that the number of searches you see for keywords at WT are far less that at Google. The reason for this is that WT gives you access to searches taking place on MetaCrawler like search engines where all popular search engines are made available to people via one search box. Though the traffic to these metacrawlers is much less as compared to direct traffic to Google, the searches you see here are conducted by real human beings all the time with no intervention by bots or any other software-based search. This means that you have access to clean search data, and clean search data is what you need for effective evaluation of a niche.

7. When you search for pregnancy diabetes in WT, you will undoubtedly find a tonne of different niche marketing “sub-topics” within the keywords you see. For example, “pregnancy diabetes in women over 30” or “pregnancy diabetes at an early age”, etc.

8. These “sub-topics” allow you to form the concept of niche marketing “micro niches” in your head – allowing you to effectively target a small but targeted segment of the bit “pregnancy diabetes” niche instead of the whole niche.

9. Select any keywords that speak of the same “sub-topics” – choose only ONE sub-topic for now, and export all those keywords into an Excel file through the options available at WordTracker.

—

You now have a reasonably sized list of keywords in a micro niche within a much larger, popular niche like “pregnancy diabetes” that you can use to conduct SEO niche marketing campaigns to promote products via Article Marketing, Blogging or Link Exchanges etc. OR you can go the other route and actually invest a small sum of money in a Google Adwords PPC Campaign and promote a legitimate product in the niche on ClickBank or Commission Junction – YES, you CAN promote ClickBank products via Google Adwords, anyone who tells you that you can’t doesn’t know how to run a proper PPC campaign 😉

So that was a big storyline project on how to go about “starting out” in niche marketing.

This is not the end of anything, it’s merely the beginning, but hopefully you will find it a nice step forward in conducting some heavy-duty niche marketing practices in the near future 🙂

 

Ali is also an Affiliate Marketer, Product Creation & Launch Consultant, Copywriter, and one of the most Highly Recognized Programmers in the Internet Marketing world, the Lead Technologist behind the Blockbuster Launch of The Internet Time Machine, and Search Engine NowRelevant.com, and has been mentioned for his work in several International News Publications such as Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, NY Times, LA Times, and Reuters, to name a few.