Find Your Micro-Niche - And Succeed!
By Malcolm Leyshon Copyright © 2009
A common mistake that new internet marketers make is
failing to find and market to a clearly defined micro-niche
market. This is the cause of a large proportion of small
internet business failures. There are many well established
businesses in broad markets like "internet marketing" or
"self improvement." If you do not narrow down your market,
you will put yourself against very tough competition, which
includes the most established, most experienced and most
successful marketers on the internet.
On the other hand, if you have a viable product or service
to offer to a narrow and clearly defined segment of a
particular niche market, you will have a much better chance
of finding success online even without any prior experience.
Having a unique product of your own targeting a
well-defined market provides you with an advantage. It will
be easier for you to gain top rankings in the search
engines simply by writing and posting articles about your
product on your website and on your blog. You will stand a
good chance of success because the keywords you need for
your products will naturally occur in the process of
writing about them. You do not even have to have any
knowledge of Search Engine Optimization techniques or
keyword research. Since there will not be much competition
and you will be one of few people writing on that
particular topic, you are likely to hit page one of Google
without doing anything else.
If your product has a hungry market, your articles and blog
posts will start to attract highly targeted traffic to your
website. As long as you make it easy for people to purchase
your products, and the prices are within expectations, the
odds of converting a reasonable percentage of traffic into
sales should be quite high.
This is due to the fact that anyone using a search engine
that finds your page will most likely have entered a very
specific search phrase. It is known that when someone uses
a more specific search phrase, the more commercial intent
they have.
Of course, your results will improve if you apply SEO
techniques to your web pages and actively seek out and
cultivate your market on the internet, but you can get a
long way simply by writing about your niche product and
benefiting from the long-tail keyword phrases that occur as
a natural result of what you write.
So how can you seek out and cultivate your market?
Seek out your market by going where it is. Think about
where your likely customers might hang out on the internet.
What forums and social sites would they hang out in? Join
those forums and social sites and participate in the
conversations.
Cultivate your market by actively responding to both direct
and indirect queries. By indirect queries I mean those
questions that people post on forums that are relevant to
your niche market. By responding to those questions on the
forums, you are setting yourself up as an expert in that
particular field. Simply add a link to your website in your
forum signature file, and each time you respond to a
question, you will be quietly providing a way for the
readers of that thread on the forum to check out your
website.
Another thing you can do is provide a way for people to
sign up to your newsletter when they visit your website.
You can use an autoresponder to set up this kind of
service. This is a great way to gather names and e-mail
addresses of potential customers and connect with them via
e-mail.
Too many marketers fail simply because they do not follow
up on the messages that they receive from prospective
customers. Be diligent in responding to any queries you
receive by e-mail. When people ask you questions, they are
actually inviting you to help and advise them, and if they
like what they hear, you stand a very good chance of
converting that person into a loyal customer.
One more thing you can do is strengthen your position on
the search engines by posting articles relating to your
niche market on article directories. You have already
achieved good search engine rankings for your niche
product, and every time you post an article on one of the
leading article directories, you will reinforce your
position at the top and dominate your niche market.
The beauty of the techniques I have mentioned is that they
are either free or cost very little to implement. Your
biggest expense would be your autoresponder and
micro-business with a mailing list of less than 500 names.
We are talking about a budget of less than twenty dollars a
month.
So as you can see, if you can set up a micro-niche-business
with a viable product, you can achieve success on the
internet much more easily than if you try to compete with
the big boys in broad and competitive niches.
About the Author:
For more information about how to start a home business and
get a Recession Proof Business with Internet Work from Home
Ideas and Opportunities at http://www.malcolmleyshon.com you will find a wide range of tried and tested ideas
including a daily newsletter and a free 325 page e-book.