Niche marketing research is one of the most important points about the early stages of an Internet Marketing campaign. If you don’t know what is driving your market to do things, then you don’t stand much chance of making any money. This is true even if you are getting traffic.
A Quick Definition of Niche Research
I created this video of what I consider a niche market to be. Don’t go in with high expectations. It is my first upload to Youtube, finally!
Researching your market is basically like conducting a survey to see the phrases, problems, fears, and emotions that people have about a topic. Your niche will be a smaller part of a larger market.
For example, you may be thinking about making a movie review site. It is a broad topic. Your niche market would then be something like Comedy. We say that we are “drilling down” into our niche. To drill down even further, you may take the idea of a comedy movie site and narrow it to an 80′s comedy movie site. That is a tighter niche and you would be more likely to dominate those keyword phrases as opposed to a comedy movie site.
The same goes for the niches within the football market:
Examples of NFL Niches
Here are Some Examples of Niche Research Tactics that I Use
Keyword research is one of the best ways to go about digging into your market. There are a hundred different ways to look up keyword phrases. I wrote a long guide, which is really more of a short book about it. You should get it by signing up on the top right of this site. (You can make a separate Gmail if you don’t trust me!)
I won’t go into too much depth, but keyword research uncovers the exact phrases that your potential audience is searching for in the search engines.
Another powerful tactic is to go cruising the forums that have to do with your niche. While you do this, make sure you have a notepad or writing program open to take notes. Head over to Google and search “your topic” forum, discussions, etc. Big Boards and Google Groups are sites that are made up of thousands of forums and topics.
As you look around, take note of the emotional words they are using. You want to solve their problems with your site. The better you can put your finger on the pulse of your audience, the more money you will make. This is because you will have a better idea of the exact products that you can refer to help them. Also, make sure that the topics are recent since markets are always shifting.
Quantcast is another great site. Grab the URL of the top authority sites in your niche and run them through Quantcast. It will tell you the demographics of the types of people who are visiting those sites.
I also like Google Insights. Run a few relevant keywords through it and check out the suggestions at the bottom of directions to take your site or blog posts.
When starting a new campaign, niche research is the one thing that you can not skimp on. For about a year, I neglected it for the most part. Changing my attitude towards it and taking my time are what I feel has contributed to my recent success after so much failure!
Don’t make the same mistake. Be thorough and learn about your audience and your online community. Save yourself the misery!
