Niche Marketing Strategy

The best strategy is to find ‘backdoor’ access to your audience that is cheap, plentiful and overlooked by other marketers, because they focus on a market, not a niche.

This article should give you several “aha” moments. You will take a different approach to your business if you implement the ideas presented below.

Market Vs Niche

People want to start a business with a focus on something popular, so they choose something like weight loss. This is a market, not a niche. A market is too broad, advertising is too expensive, and there is a lot of competition.

A market, in broad terms, refers to a group of consumers with similar needs or wants. It encompasses a larger target audience and usually involves a wide range of products or services. A market can be further divided into segments based on demographics, psychographics, or geographical factors. For instance, the clothing market can be segmented into men’s, women’s, and children’s apparel.

On the other hand, a niche is a subset of a market. It represents a more specific, smaller group of individuals with distinct preferences, interests, or needs. Niche markets are characterized by their focused nature, catering to a particular audience segment. For example, within the clothing market, a niche could be sustainable and eco-friendly clothing specifically for women.

This does not have to be long tail keywords, such as 55 year old females, with Hawaiian ancestry, who are left handed, living in Rhode Island. However, if long tail keywords are not competitive and reach your intended demographics, certainly use them.

The best way to find niches is to search by keywords, to see what people are looking for consistently on a month to month basis. Consider searches about intent, problem solving, and answers to questions.

Finding A Back Door To A Niche

Using our weight loss example, we can find thousands of searches per month. Competitive keywords demanding a high price per click. Trying keto diet or mediterranean diet does make the move from market to niche, but the competition and advertising costs are similarly high!

When someone has a weight loss concern, consider what searches they conduct concerning intent, problem solving, or answers to questions as mentioned previously.

Here are some examples: How much water to drink every day? How many calories in soda? Calories in a banana? Nutrition content of avocado?

Do people wake up and just randomly search these terms because they are bored. Of course not. However, it is obviously they are concerned about their health status, and highly likely they are serious about weight loss.

Look up these keywords on: www.wordstream.com

Free Tools: Free Keyword Tool

The keywords above are only a sampling of the questions people are asking and the data they are seeking on a monthly basis. Did you notice the listed competition levels and estimated advertising costs when you looked at these in the keyword tool?

While everyone else is fighting competition for the diet terms, you just found a few simple searches for people who are interested in weight loss (and remember this is data, not wishful thinking).

Let’s move away from food, but these keywords are still related. Look up body mass index, or BMI calculator, and calories burned. These health measurements and consumption questions show a concern about their weight, even though they did not directly do a food search.

How many search terms can you find for calories in food? How many foods are there? How many search terms can you find for calories burned by exercises? How many different exercises exist?

How do you get these people to the keto diet or mediterranean diet? You make content providing answers to the questions first, then you show how the keto diet, mediterranean diet (or whatever product) is the solution to all of the questions and concerns.

If you cannot make direct content, you use similar or related content. Staying with the theme of weight loss. you create a site about food nutrition or calories. You can use paid or organic traffic.

With this site, you will advertise diet offers or fitness programs. Any of these should pay a lot more than the cost of traffic for someone to view your nutrition site. As an alternative, you can have an ad network on the site, with ads for the high paying diet and fitness offers.

You try to ‘get in the head’ of someone with a problem or concern and try to anticipate what types of questions they would ask.

The value lies in your ability to ethically bridge the gap from finding an audience with questions or concerns and giving them the answer or solution!

Have you experienced your “aha” moment yet?

The Glossary Method

Take the time to see if your niche has a glossary, or specific industry terms that have meaning exclusively for that industry. For our example, we will use the mortage industry. This is a market with a lot of competition and high advertising costs. However, let’s see if we can find some ‘backdoor’ searches.

Go to your search engine, and type name of market, and glossary. Find some specific descriptions and put them in your keyword search. Start with the mortgage samples below.

While the random samples from mortgage glossary vary in volume and price, you will notice they are much lower than trying to pay for the term: mortgage.

Who just wakes up one day and decides to look at any of these keywords? Someone is only doing this with purpose and intent.

Even if they found the term on another site, can your site expand on the definition and application of the keyword? For example, with amoritization, you can provide online calculators and printable guides about the topic. The natural progression is to lead them to your offer, such as getting a quote from a mortgage company (a CPA offer that pays fairly well).

Checklist

A checklist indicates someone has an interest in a specific topic. While we do not know if they are just starting their work, or finishing their work on the topic, we know they are actively working with the topic.

As an example, consider an apartment checklist. Someone wants to know the steps needed to physically move to another location. When you provide this information, you can incorporate affiliate links for necessary products and services. In our example, this may include moving services, internet providers, renter insurance, and fitness centers.

Calculators

If somone is looking for a calculator, they are compiling data, seeking estimates, or trying to decide how to incorporate a purchase into a budget. If you go into a deep dive (Google Keyword Tool) you will find numerous search terms with high monthly volumes involving calculators, many at a low rate.

Some calculators are available as WordPress plug ins or Php scripts. These examples are fairly cheap options and can be incorporated into a website. A programmer on Fiverr can be hired to build almost any kind of calculator you can imagine. Another option is to find a company that will license the use of their products on your website. You may get the calculator you need for a small annual fee.

Feeder And Lead Generation Sites

Another option with this strategy is to build sites about these topics, and send people to those sites. You could have several sites with different keywords, and send those people to your main site. This technique is more advanced, but think about the possibilites of sending someone to a primary site or using these feeder sites to generate leads you can sell.

Using our previous example, you would create a nutrition site. You would send all leads to your diet site instead of trying to place ads on this site.

Searching Data With Commercial Intent

I have previously mentioned searches such as ‘how many calories’ or similar. How about data that someone may need to conduct business.

Airport codes are abbreviations used by airports worldwide. This search shows someone is actively planning travel, and this lower cost phrase can lead you into the travel market.

Searches for country codes may indicate travel, or may indicate communication in another country. This may lead to the travel market. Another possibility is VOIP, voice over internet protocol, which is highly competitive.

Consider online searches for currency conversion. This could indicate travel or international commerce.

More Search Tips

Consider your online searches when you want to find answers to questions, fix problems, or diagnose conditions. In this way, you can create content and websites based on data, actual confirmed and consistent monthly searches, by real humans seeking answers. You can build entire businesses around the data, instead of chasing the tail end of a fad, or trying to compete with high cost guru inspired topics.

Consider someone looking for data in a certain format: ebook, pdf, chart, graph, excel file. Maybe they want to convert something: docx to pdf, pounds to kilograms, dollar to euro.

Random ideas: signs of, symptoms of, iphone won’t, computer won’t, error code.

You may have interests and passions, but do not ignore what data can do for you and your income potential. Some of these niches are not ‘trendy’ or ‘fashionable’ or even ‘sexy.’ However, they have thousands of solutions seekers each and every month willing to pay you directly or through an affiliate link.

Conclusion

Consider a niche based on data, not emotion. Do not try to compete with saturated markets that command high advertising costs. Be willing to look at boring or unpopular niches, where you can meet needs and solve problems with ethical affiliate programs.

As you plug in these various searches into a keyword tool, you will be amazed at the number of searches per month. You will discover keywords you never considered, and you will soon realize a world of underdeveloped niches.