Niche Marketing Blueprint Part One

I'm often asked the question "I want to get into niche marketing - where do I start?" so I thought I'd offer a brief outline.

First of all let me give you an unconventional definition of a niche market… A starving crowd with money to spend!

There's no point in doing anything within a niche market unless there is a large enough group of people willing to spend money on a product or service that meets a specific need or demand. So your first task is to find a hot niche topic and find a starving crowd who are willing to spend their cash on a solution to a pressing problem.

 The next step is to find out where they are already being fed. Do some keyword research with the free Wordtracker Keyword Tool to identify the most searched for keywords or phrases, check out which competitor sites are in the top ten search results for each of the most popular keyword phrases. Visit their sites and see what they offer that is unique to them.

Now it's time to find out what that hungry crowd is most interested in. Look for Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) pages and see which questions get asked most often. Check out the forums in the niche market, search Yahoo! Answers, search the social bookmaeking sites such as Digg and Stumbleupon.

OK, so now you have a clear idea about what your market is looking for and you have identified what your competitors are offering. Look for the gap.. What are your competitors missing? What could you offer that they don't?

When you've spotted an under-developed sub-niche in the market, it's time to register a domain name. Don't go rushing off just yet! You could save yourself a lot of time and effort if there's an expired domain available (I recommend the Domain Name Seek tool) as long as it isn't too high a price to make it worthwhile. Look for domains with existing backlinks, a history of traffic and that are already listed in the search engines (Domains in the Yahoo! directory will attract a premium price).

As soon as you have your domain, set up your hosting account (preferably with Fantastico) and install a Wordpress blog. Kick off your blog with two or three articles and plan to add at least three more articles within the first week. Check your stats and look out for the Googlebot, as soon as your site has been indexed you can add Adsense blocks.

I like to place Adsense at the top left of the posts and, when you think about it, Google will actually pay you to collect more research about your niche market.

In Niche Blueprint Part Two I'll explain what steps I recommend to take your blog to the next level.