How to Niche Down Your Market to Succeed

It 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?

Follow Your Passion

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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.

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

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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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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

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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.

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

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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.

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.