If you don't find a niche market for the product or service you offer, you will have a difficult time being successful. Most newcomers who wish to do business on the Internet often market to everyone they can find with the expectation that everyone will do business with them. This is the same as throwing mud against the wall and hoping some of it will stick. They have not yet found their niche market.

What is niche marketing?

A niche market is composed of individuals and businesses that have similar interests and needs, which can be readily identified and that can be easily targeted and reached.

Finding a niche for your business means finding a great product or service for a highly targeted audience.

Here's the process to find your niche business

1. Find a niche product or service you are passionate about. This will greatly improve your chances of being successful. Why? Because it's the only way you're going to be able to devote the kind of time and effort to create a meaningful web site, build up the right traffic, generate worthwhile income, and enjoy what you're doing.

2. Choose a niche product you are knowledgeable about. Reflect on what skills, hobbies or products you know the most about. If you don't have the knowledge yet, then choose a niche product that you would love to promote, then spend the necessary time to research it, so you can eventually become an expert in your marketing field.

3. Define your niche market - do the necessary research to see if there is a market for your niche product. To create a profitable business for your niche product, you need to ask yourself these questions:

a) Is there sufficient demand for it? - if you choose a field that is too broad it may be hard to stand out from the competition. For example, camping equipment could be your niche product. Well, unless you are a large corporation such as Sports Authority (a large retail store in my town), you won't stand out from the crowd. However, a more highly targeted niche product could be Coleman Camping Equipment.

b) Keyword research - use keyword tools such as the overture suggestion tool (http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion) or wordtracker (wordtracker.com) to find how many people are searching each month on keywords related to your niche product.

Here's an example:

According to overture (at the time of writing this article), the keyword phrase "camping equipment" was searched 76164 times in one month. If you do a search on Google.com for camping equipment you will find 1,610,000 web sites show up - heck, that's too competitive.

However "coleman camping equipment" generated 1242 searches in one month according to overture. Google.com shows 93,200 competing websites. That's much better though still somewhat competitive.

Tip: Notice there are not many web sites (even the top ones), that have "coleman camping equipment" in their titles. This is just one of the ways to obtain a high ranking on the search engines for your newly targeted web site. This will then provide lots of targeted traffic to your site.

c) Take a survey ? you may already have products or services that you selling to your customers. If so, ask questions within your survey about what product or service would help your customers business. If it can help them save time by gaining more knowledge or automating tasks, you could have a winner.

d) Create Your Own Unique Selling Position (USP) - study your competition to find out what they emphasize about the product which makes them stand out from the crowd. Then decide on something that will make your business unique from the others. It could be something unique about the product (ie discount coleman camping equipment) or you could choose a more highly defined target market (ie boyscout organizations and clubs throughout the USA that use coleman's camping equipment).

4. Build and promote your web site - to develop a profitable web site for your niche product you need to create a number of informative pages that will not only attract visitors from the search engines, but inform and move them to purchase from your site.

Read my article, "How to Create a Web Site That Sells" (http://www.isitebuild.com/buildingA.htm).

Niche marketing is the key to developing a profitable business that will make you stand out from the crowd. By doing the necessary research and building an informative web site, you will become an expert in your niche marketing field.

Resources
ebook - "Strike it Niche"