A Niche Marketing Definition and Some Examples

A niche is simply a targeted and specific sub market within a larger market or industry. Sometimes, I think of it in terms of Anthropology. In that science, an animal's niche is just the time and environment that it exists in.

How this applies to marketing is that you want to find a niche that you are interested in or passionate about. I say this because if you are not a fan of your niche market, you won't put your full effort into it.

You need to have the motivation of interest to share your knowledge and study it inside and out until you are an expert.

To really wrap my head around topics, I need some concrete examples. Let me beat you over the head with some more examples in case you are the same way!

I like to use different examples of niches because I am sick of hearing about the damn "dog training" or "widgets" example, though dogs are awesome...

So, within the energy industry we have a lot of sub industries. These include coal, fossil fuels, solar, wind, and hydro, plus some more. Now, let's look at the industry segment of solar power. When we examine more and more specific parts of an industry or market, we say that we are "drilling down" into that market. (It works well for the fossil fuel energy sector, get it, drilling down...)

Back to solar. Within the solar energy market, we have solar cells, companies that build solar farms or outfit houses, and the solar batteries that store the power.

We can drill down further within solar cells and some niches or micro niches may be the materials that make up the cells, the physics behind them, and the suppliers of the materials. So a niche would be: "solar cell material suppliers". It goes from broad to specific.

In Internet business and marketing I hear the terms niche marketing and micro niche markets all the time. The reason that millions of people have seen success through things like affiliate marketing is because the Internet is perfectly designed to get into a niche for cheap or free.

Here's what I mean. When starting out online, the most vital thing you can learn is keyword research. Keywords are the phrases that people are typing into the search engines. There are dozens of tools, paid and free, that will tell you approximately how many times each keyword phrase is being searched for per month or per day.

As you discover more and more keyword phrases with these tools, you are essentially drilling down into a niche like I explained above. Next, we look at the difficulty of the competition that is popping up in the search engines for this. We try to position our content in front of these phrases.

So, Internet Marketers and Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs) constantly try to break into these niches in this way. We also do it through social media, but search engines still deliver us the most relevant visitors since we know exactly what words they are typing in to find us.

I was guilty for a while of making a bunch of crappy sites. Some of the niches I got into I knew a lot about and some I was only trying to make some money.

When I approached it with this mindset, it was no wonder that I struggled and most of my sites failed. I focused more on the tactics to get my sites ranked in the search engines. Looking back that was completely the wrong mind set. Now, I stick with my true passion which is teaching about search engines and blogging.

If you have been doing this a while and have not seen success, take this lesson to heart. Look into a niche that you would have fun making some videos about.

Ask yourself some questions:
What do you love to do in your free time?
What do you have fun doing?
What topic would you love to teach people?
What are you an expert in, or WANT to become an expert in?
What topic are you always thinking about?

When I asked myself these questions, I realized that I had been coming back to the blogging, SEO, IM niche time and again. Sure, it is one of the hardest niches to be successful in since everyone knows how to rank in search engines, but I can't deny that I love it and I study it and write about it every day to teach.

The masses are online discussing their problems related to niche markets. They are looking for answers to their problems and they go to specific places for this. You want to be there, too.

If you are starting out into a niche market, some of the best places for info are the forums and groups. Simply run a Google search for "your niche" forum or group. Also, the top sites and blogs that are in the search listings provide a lot of information.

Some more web sites where massive amounts of people are asking questions and interacting are: Ask.com, Yahoo Answers, and About.com. Running searches on the social sites can also yield a lot of info. The most popular being: Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, and LinkedIn.

Look at the number of posts and replies, or likes to see the level of interest. Constantly take notes about the most popular topics within your niche and especially things like problems, emotions, fixes, cures.