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The term Niche marketing is bandied about by online marketers like it’s the cure for all ills. You can’t turn around in one of those heavily trafficked internet seminars where thousands meet to “find the cure” without running into half a dozen splinter groups discussing the merits/demerits ( but mostly merits ) of tightly focused Niche marketing.

So, for the newbies amongst us, what is niche marketing? Can we eat it, buy it, use it up or make the ecology green with it?

So let’s see what its isn’t. - It isn’t something you can buy - It isn’t something you can make ( well not directly ) - It’s not a new job opening so don’t ask your boss for a transfer - And as usual, the hordes of people taking a stab at it are nearly all probably going to fail.

Niche Marketing - An example

I am going to make up a definition on the fly here. Niche marketing is marketing that is directed very specifically at a very narrow vertical market segment. So, let’s try this one.

Marketing to those that buy - runners. Niche or not? Not - Nike runners. Niche or not. Not (What did that surprise you?) - Nike marathon capable running shoes. Niche or not? Feeling the sun yet ? - cpu enhanced marathon capable Nike runners. Niche or no Niche? Jackpot !

So, the warmth of the sun is shining on our face, its going to be a great day. We can now see the light, yaddy yaddy, yaw. So where do we go from here? We have accurately identified a niche right? And isn’t that what everyone is talking about? Do we stock up now or wait for Christmas?

Not even! You have heard this street english term before right? No, I am not keeping this niche area for myself, so don’t think I am holding back. Truth is, our premise of a niche marketplace sounds good but is unproven.

Don’t mistake an example of what the end product might look like with the actual process used to find that niche market. That was NOT the process, in fact, its not even close to the process. While the process can be done manually, you really need a tool since you want to examine and reject tens and tens of potential niches before settling on one to promote. And by the way, even if one of the niche tools highlighted this particular example and a week later 4 friends asked me for the same product I would still have some hesitations…

Was that an inaccurate Niche Market example ?

So, that was a poor example right? Honestly, we dont know yet. People search using specific key phrases. A lot of people end up using the exact same key phrases. To determine whether this product is a niche product or not we need to plum information that only search engines or search engine tools similar to keywordwatcher normally possess. To further quantify all of that data really quickly, we would then need to go beyond even the search engine tools, to a new kind of product that combines the functionality of a search engine tool with niche marketing information

If we know how many people are searching for the product and how many competing websites there are, isn’t this enough information to quantify this as a niche product? Wasn’t this what groups traditionally used to make their decision in the past? Well, it was, but it’s not enough anymore. There are tools out there now that can make a newbie 10 times more efficient and powerful than the traditional analysis used just 6 months ago.

Save yourself some time. Don’t try to manually analyze whether or not you think you may have found a niche market product. If you have been in internet marketing or online marketing for some time, its likely that you have used Google’s excellent search engine tools hidden in the adwords product. Perhaps even you have used freekeywords from KeyWordwatcher. Thats how I and many others use to start our search for Niche Market Products - but not any more. These battle tested tools are not nearly enough for this area of internet marketing.

A software based Niche tool can be an extraordinarily powerful piece of arsenal for someone investigating this area. Most tools gave you competitiveness based on the number of sites that had the keyword in them, but most of us know that our search phrase is already on millions of websites but just a few hundred of those might be competitively attempting to get traffic based on that keyword. A Niche market tool, intuitively understands this and in this specific area searches for keywords in the titles, urls and domain names and comes back with a ranking. It can frequently open clickbank and other affiliate sites with your exact keywords to find affiliate products. Sometimes, these tools also understand article marketing and may directly find you an article for reprint.

At this stage in online marketing, it no longer makes sense to find Niche Market products the old way. Watch the videos here and see what I mean

One last thing about niche keyword research. Recently there has been a fair amount of research into something called commercial intent. Microsoft has an online program that enables one to see if a searched for phrase has stronger commercial intent than research behind it.