niche marketing for dummies

Choosing a niche is the biggest struggle for many newbies. Most reports advise the newbies to pick the most profitable niches. This is the main reason why so many newbie marketers fail before they even start marketing: They place money as the top priority and go after the most profitable looking niche, and burn themselves out as a result, not to mention getting frustrated in the end and giving up.

The best advice I can give to any newbie is to choose a niche about something you either know well, or really like and enjoy. It is true that there are marketers out there who pick niches they know nothing about and make a killing, but remember, these are experienced marketers with huge autoresponder lists with tens of thousands of subscribers, web sites with huge amounts of traffic, systems where you can build an overnight cash machine in any chosen niche, and the money to hire outsourcers to do all the grunt work for setting it up.

As a newbie, you don't have any of these, and the worst thing you can do is to get into some niche you don't care for and know nothing about, burn yourself out doing grunt work for it, writing articles for hours, maybe even waste a bunch of money purchasing backlink packages and end up with little traffic, hardly any ranking, and no income after all this hard work and investing your time, energy and money into it.

So, the biggest favor you can do to yourself is to write down a list of your interests and hobbies, topics you really enjoy, and use this list for your niche research. It's far easier to get tons of traffic when you write content for something you are passionate about.

Choose a niche you enjoy, at least until you learn how to generate considerable amount of targeted traffic and make it stick around to surf your site(s).

If you do this, finding relevant forums, blogs and other sites related to your niche, writing facebook and twitter swipes, articles, blog and forum posts, submitting your posts to digg, stumbleupon,and other social bookmarking sites will not be chores that burn you out and cause you to quit before you generate any traffic and income.

For most internet marketing newbies, these tasks are chores to endure. So many newbies burn out with article writing and give up because the articles they write are devoid of quality, they end up littering the interwebs instead of generating traffic or subscribers.

Use common sense: Don't jump into oversaturated markets!

Do another big favor to yourself: Don't go after oversaturated niches like the ones listed in the Squiddon't list. These are the examples internet marketers are giving in their free reports, and they are giving these examples for good reason -these are all oversaturated and most keywords associated with them set off spam alarms everywhere.

Most newbies read those reports and instead of taking a moment to do niche research, they jumped all over those terrible examples and started flooding article directories, squidoo, digg and other web 2.0 sites with it. This is why these topics are in the squidon't list! (Remember those annoying Nigerian spam emails, how many of you bothered to read them?)

You can see great niche ideas by looking out of the window!

Sure, there are still profitable sub-niches in these oversaturated markets but these are just not good starter niches for newbies. You need a lot of experience and skills to be able to make money off of these without sounding spammy and annoying everyone. On the other hand, if you have a hobby such as scrapbooking or car rigging, you can generate great content and decent residual income from it. No one bans, flags or blacklists soapmaking or metalsmithing related content as spam.

Hobby related niches will not make you rich or turn you into superaffiliates overnight, but you will learn the SEO, traffic generation, backlinking, social media marketing basics and build a solid foundation without burning yourself out.