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Home::Online Promotion
What's a Niche and How Do You Find One?
Author : Kathryn Beach
According to Wikipedia, a niche is "a special place
within the scheme of things." Niche marketing is defined as
"the process of finding and serving small but potentially
profitable market segments and designing custom-made products or
services for them." So it's all about finding your special
place and the products and services that fit.
Right from the start, you should understand that your goal in
discovering a niche is to concentrate all your ideas and
thoughts into the most precise, concise, and focused concept
possible. Your potential audience is everyone in the world
with computer access and an interest in your site's topic. Your
potential information resources are everything known about that
topic. So you want to be sure to have enough information to
eventually fill hundreds of pages, and you want to narrow your
focus enough that you can be perceived as an expert, as "THE
place to go" for information, products, and/or services.
I want to add right now that if your only interest is making
money online, this is a very difficult subject to build a
website around these days. That niche was "hot" eight years ago.
Most successful internet entrepreneurs in that area say they
would not attempt breaking into that niche if they were starting
out today. There's just too much competition, there are way too
many experts already. Breaking into a niche using keywords like
"make money at home" "work at home" "home business" is next to
impossible. There are billions of niches out there; find yours.
Focus, focus, focus...
Let's say you're interested in art. You can narrow your focus by
choosing an art medium, period in history, particular artist,
subject (still lifes, dogs, clothing, hairstyles, architecture,
etc.), events, geographical location, and/or the life and
inspiration of one or more artists. Your aim should be to choose
as many of these focal points as possible, so that the end
result is extremely well-defined subject matter.
Then you want to find out how frequently people are searching
for this information, what keywords they are entering in the
search engines, and how many sites are currently available with
that information. Eventually you will come up with your concept,
your keywords, and you can begin creating your domain name and
meta tags for your website.
Keywords were named that for a reason...
Every page on your website will have its own keywords.
These are the words that people will enter into a search
engine and find your webpage. Maybe your art interest has
been narrowed down to the history of London architecture as
depicted in the photographs of John Doe. You must find the best
keywords, see what sites are currently available, maybe change
your focus until you find just the right balance between what's
hot, what's available, and what's wide open for you.
This all may seem a bit confusing, and it's not my purpose here
to show you exactly how to do all this, because there's already
a step-by-step manual available and it's free, so why reinvent
the wheel? It's the Affiliate Masters
Course by SiteSell. Pick up your copy and go through it
one page at a time. Don't skip steps no matter how tedious they
may seem, because once this work is done, you'll pick up speed
and you'll never lose focus.
Doing your homework completely at the beginning is crucial to
your success. It's the hardest part, and at the moment, the
least rewarding. But once it's done, you've got the skeleton,
the foundation, of everything else you will be doing. You'll
have a list of websites to refer back to for researching all the
rest of your web pages, articles, links, and so on.
Might as well start out with the current "hot item"...
One last tool before I wind this up. There's a new kind of free
advertising out there that's also an incredible tool when you're
gathering information. It's called "Social Bookmarking" or
"tagging". It's the latest alternative to linking, but it's also
a great way to create your reference list when you're going
through the Affiliate Masters Course. In addition to creating
spreadsheets with the information you find as you're directed to
do within AMC, you can create your own bookmark page online
containing all the sites you visit that are relevant to your
niche. Eventually this forms a web of links and backlinks, but
in the meantime you'll have all your sites for further research
in one place. Here's a place to read more about "tagging".
It's a free service until you wish to use it for advertising,
then there's a one-time fee. For now, the free offer is all you
need, and it's a great help as you're getting started building
your niche website.
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