How to Niche Down Your Market to Succeed

By | January 9, 2017

How to Niche Down Your Market to SucceedIt doesn’t matter if you are just starting a blog as a hobby and to earn a little extra money or you are starting a business.  It is very important to find your target market.  A niche is a specialized market.  When doing research online about building a business you will find the word niche, a lot.  You will also hear “niche down”.  Well if you take it literally it makes no sense.  So how do you niche down?my recommendations

Follow Your Passion


We have all heard the saying “do what you like and you will never work a day in your life”.  The first step would be find that niche.  I will try to follow one example through to find a niche. And explain the step by step process.

Let’s say you love fish.  Well fish would be a huge topic and way too broad.  For example, if you go after the fish market what part of that market would you go after?  Maybe you like to eat fish so you are going to make a site about cooking and eating fish; or maybe like keeping fish; or once more maybe you want to discuss fishing.

Each one of those topics are very broad and would be hard to get any traction at all. Also, while there may be some overlap in each of those topics a person searching for how to keep fish would probably bypass your site about eating fish.  Likewise, a person searching for how to cook a specific fish will probably also skip your site on keeping fish.how to find a niche for marketing

Again, a niche that was something like “all about fish” would simple be too big to tackle.  As you can see there are about 374,000,000 competing websites for that term.  So what should you do?  Well you niche down.  Find your target audience and write for them.  Using the what I started above. Let us pretend that we want to get into the keeping fish niche.

Narrow Your Terms


Okay so we narrowed the terms from fish to keeping fish.  We are done, right? Wrong!  That is still far too broad of term. Think of all the topics within that large niche.  I will just list a few here but there are many more: Keeping fish in a large aquarium, keeping large fish, keeping small fish, keeping fish in a pond, keeping a certain type of fish, keeping freshwater fish, saltwater fish, reef aquarium, river fish…

You get the idea there are thousands of different topics to choose from just in the keeping fish niche.  Head back to that passion of yours again.  Let us say you have, or always wanted to have a large indoor aquarium with angelfish in it.

Time for Research


It is keyword research time now.  I have gone over some of this in other posts and you can read one here.  I will however quickly go over how to do the research for it here as well.  Head over to Google and start your alphabet soup method of keyword research.Tell Search Engines your There

Once you have a large amount of keywords from Google head over to your keyword analysis tool.  I personally use Jaaxy.  You can read more about Jaaxy here.

Research Your Competition


Once you have that large list of keywords start imputing them into your keyword analysis tool.  Here you want to look for:

  • The amount of searches each keyword gets
  • The competing websites each keyword has
  • The SEO power the phrases have.

Each one of these are very important to keep track of so you can complete your research properly.  I personally input them into a spreadsheet.  By making columns for each subject I want to track I can easily sort the best keywords for my niche.What is keyword research in Jaaxy

Now you want to find the keywords with the most searches, lowest number of competing websites (best less than 100 but not more than 300), and the highest SEO power.  These will be your first articles you will want to write about.  One more thing to keep in mind.  You will want to have each phrase make sense.  Google knows when you are hunting for typos and improper grammar and they don’t like it.

More Competition Research


Now that you have the best of the best you need to go back to Google and search each phrase to see what those websites look like.  Take a look at their authority, backlinks, their articles, and see if you think you can beat them.

Don’t worry I use free Chrome tools Moz, SEOQuake, and Open SEO stats. Just get them added to your browser extension and you can use them for free.  I have not paid for any of those services.

May people make the mistake of skipping this step. I think it is a very powerful step to help you rank quickly. You can even get ideas from those top sites on what to write about under that topic.  DON’T COPY.  Just get the ideas.

Targeting


Now that you have a group of keywords and ideas, it is time to sit down and find your target audience.  Don’t say anyone who will listen. Start by figuring out who would listen to you or would want to read the subject.  This may include their age, gender, income, housing situation, and even more.  Take the time to really figure out who that person is.target marketing

Think of that target person as a friend. They can become one of your best friends.  Think about their personality and what they would want to know about.  Once you really define your target audience then and only then can you really begin.

Decision


After you have done all of that research you should have a pretty good idea if there is a market for what you want to write about.  You should also have a good idea who your target market is.  When you start writing always write to that one person you defined.  Doing so will give your writing a sole to that target market that is reading it.  It will help captivate them.

Before you do any of that you need to make a decision.  You need to decide if you are going to pursue this new niche you have researched or move onto another topic.  That decision is completely up to you.  If you chose to continue working in that niche bear in mind that you should be excited about the topic enough to write a couple of times a week for at least 9 months.  Remember I said pick something you are passionate about, well this is why and it will be really easy.  One last thing.  Don’t be afraid of some competition.  If there is no competition you might need to rethink the niche.idea plan action to a niche

Should you chose not to pursue that niche just start the search again.  Once you do it a few times you will be surprised how quickly you will be able to complete the research.  Of course, at anytime you can start over if you discover that the niche is not right for you.

I hope this helped you learn how to niche down your market and give you a better understanding of staring in niche marketing.  I have learned all of this and more at my top recommendations.  If you want to see all of the things that I recommend you can click the tab in the menu section labeled recommendation.

Please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions, or questions below.

 

 

 

6 thoughts on “How to Niche Down Your Market to Succeed

  1. Deb

    Great article. Any ideas about how to do niche research more quickly? I find it so time consuming and when I spend so much time on it I become frustrated that I seem to be wasting time. How long do you think it should take to adequately research a niche?

    Thanks
    Deb

    Reply
    1. Marc Post author

      Deb,

      If it is a new niche that I find through my research I will be done in about an hour. If it does not look like it is going to work for me I will finish much earlier than that. It could even be as short as 15 minutes. Like I said after you do it a few times you will know what you are looking for and how to go about it. In other words you will become more efficient at it.

      Thanks for the comment!

      Marc

      Reply
  2. Ben

    This is great! It’s like a step by step guide to creating your own niche website. A lot of people don’t take action online because they don’t know how to get started but you are giving them direction. This is a great guide that will be able to help a lot of people.

    Reply
    1. Marc Post author

      Ben,

      Thanks for the comment and compliment. I really appreciate it! Please let me know if there is anything I can write for you in the future that you would like to know about. I will see what I can do.

      Marc

      Reply
  3. Christian

    Finding the right niche for your online business makes all the difference for working online, as you said do what you love and never work a day in your life.

    Also, not going to broad will make all the difference in your success as well, you have definitely laid out the process for those wishing to get started! Excellent article.

    Reply
    1. Marc Post author

      Christian,

      Thanks for the comment and your perspective of niching down. Let me know if there is anything I have missed.

      Marc

      Reply

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