How to Research and Find Your Niche Online

Deciding on what product or service you will promote in a niche market should be based on a simple principle. There should be a demand for your product or service. You want to offer something that people actually need, something that will make their lives better, make them feel better physically, make them look better, or help them solve a problem.

Once you have chosen a product or service to market, researching to find the right niche for your product or service is the next most important part of beginning a niche marketing program. The things that you need to know are where they spend their time online, and what makes them tick from a personal and business point of view. There is niche marketing software out there that can help you learn these things about your potential niche market.

The next thing you need to learn as you research your online niche market is what you can reasonable charge for your product or service. The best and most effective was to do this is to visit sites that advertise products or services similar to what you have chosen to sell. It should be easy to see if they are giving away a service or selling the product at a price far lower than you would have to charge.

If you can determine that there are people out there who are willing to spend money to buy what you are selling and you can identify those people then you have a niche marketing product or service that can make money on the Internet. Sometimes it takes reframing your product or service to make it more attractive, better or just different than what others are selling it for. Research is the key to successful niche marketing.

What Niche Marketing is Not

Niche marketing is not about trying to sell your product or service to the world at large. As a small businessperson, you couldn’t afford that kind of multi-million dollar advertising budget. It isn’t possible. You can, however, with only a computer, an Internet connection and a good idea sell to a smaller audience using niche marketing.

Niche marketing is not about trying to compete. Competition is taken out of the equation when you do niche marketing. You aren’t out there in the world lined up beside or behind a million other people who are selling the same thing you are selling. You are selling to a specific audience that you have created for yourself with your opt-in email list.

Niche marketing is not about selling to different people every day of the week. Once you have your list built, you can sell to the same people time and time again. By taking as much time as you need and putting forth enough effort to get to know the people who make up your list of buyers you can continue to sell to them.

Niche marketing is not about focusing on the big picture. It is about focusing on the small picture and the smaller the better. Narrowing your niche down to a very specific part of a larger market assures you of gaining a fair market share of that small part. The world is a big place and there are billions of people. You only need an infinitesimal portion of the population to have a huge list of potential buyers of your products or services.

Niche marketing is not about seeing only the impossibilities. Niche marketing is only about looking closely at the possibilities. Small possibilities converted to sales can equal big profits.

What Niche Marketing Really Is

It is just one of those hard, cruel facts of life that the big boys have all the money they need to advertise and sell their products and us little guys are on advertising budgets that are so small they probably don’t add up to what the big boys spend on paper clips in a month. Competing with the big boys isn’t feasible…or possible, for that matter. So what are us little guys supposed to do?

Niche marketing is our answer. We can’t advertise our products and services to the world at large but we don’t have to be able to do that to be able to make a pretty decent living… thanks to the Internet.

Niche marketing is selling specific products or services to a limited audience. One person with a computer, an internet connection and a good idea can go into business for himself on the Internet and target the people who would be most interested in what he has to sell and do all of the above on a very limited advertising budget.

Finding the right niche for what you have to sell isn’t really all that difficult. Just think about who the people are who would be most interested in what you have to sell. For example, if you have concocted a shampoo formula that will take chlorine out of a person’s hair, you can’t compete with giant companies that sell shampoo but you can narrow your market down to a niche and target sales to those who have swimming pools. You buy a domain, get a server, and build a website to advertise your product JUST to people who have swimming pools.

In essence, niche marketing is selling a product or service to those who want or need the product the most.

Niche Marketing vs. Internet Marketing Niche

Comparing niche marketing and an Internet marketing niche is equivalent to comparing apples with oranges. Apples and oranges are both fruit. Niche marketing and an Internet Marketing niche are both forms of Internet marketing but as different as apples are from oranges.

The term ‘niche marketing’ means selling a specific product to a specific type of buyer. There are far less competitive niches than an Internet marketing niche.  Most niche markets are more open to the latest marketing strategies, as well. Small niche markets are not over stocked with gurus and wise men and are much easier for the beginning marketer to break into. A niche market allows you to promote your own niche product or that of a niche affiliate product. There is a niche market for anything and everything you can imagine. All it takes to break into a niche market is a good idea, a good product created by you or someone else that will appeal to certain people, some advertising and the desire to succeed.

The Internet marketing niche, on the other hand, means that you will be promoting your own Internet marketing product. This is a very crowded field of endeavor and really difficult to break into. It’s a world filled with gurus and wise men who have been playing and winning the game for a long time. This doesn’t mean that it is impossible to cash in on the Internet marketing niche because, of course, you can. It is a world still built on demand and that means that if you have a product that can compete and if you have the willingness to play hard ball with the big boys then you can succeed at the Internet marketing niche game.  Just be aware that there are easier niche market nuts to crack.

What is Niche Marketing?

The word ‘niche’ is defined as: “A special area of demand for a product or service”. ‘Marketing’ is defined as: “The opportunity to buy or sell”. If you put the two works together, niche marketing means buying or selling a product or service in a special area of demand. All that really means is that a product or service is being sold to the people who are most interested in that particular product or service and not to the world in general.

Oftentimes big businesses use niche marketing. For example, a company that makes computers and computer accessories might advertise all-in-one copy/printer/scanners to the home computer user while at the same time advertising single function machines to large businesses.

One of the things that make niche marketing so attractive to sellers is that their advertising budgets go further. It costs less to advertise to a specialized market than it does to advertise to a broader market.

Niche marketing must be designed to meet the unique needs of the targeted audience. Niche marketers must tailor their product to meet those unique needs. If, for example, you have designed a product to make poodle grooming easy enough for the untrained professional to do it, those who own poodles will be most interested in your product. Those who own Blood Hounds or cats couldn’t care less. If you have written an e-book that will explain how to start and succeed at an online business, those who are looking for that information are your niche market. Those who are happy doing what they are doing are not interested at all.

Niche marketing is a very effective and cost efficient way to advertise and sell specific products or services to a specific audience or, hopefully, buyers of that product or service.