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 how would we define it ? * It’s the current fad, but its not ( This one has really long legs ) * It’s not going to be a good Xmas present – so don’t look for it * It’s not going to make anything bigger longer or … ( u get the msg ) * It’s not likely to be a new job opening anywhere soon

Niche Marketing – An example

Here is my own quick definition : Niche Marketing is an examination or sales analysis of a very narrow marketing segment that is being under-served by the competition. Let’s see what this looks like.

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 by a long shot. If you are reading this now, thinking that I am holding back, stop, don’t do it. Our research hasn’t even begun yet.

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 ?

It might be and maybe it wasn’t but we don’t know that yet. When doing this kind of research one has to remind oneself that people use specific key words when searching for a product or service. Only the search engines, search engine tools ( like wordwatcher ) really know what is being searched for. And unfortunately only niche marketing software tools can give one the market intelligence needed in order to make a business decision.

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 its 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.

You may be someone with experience with keyword usage based on several of the great tools out there like wordwatcher or the excellent google adwords tool that gives you exact number of potential clients for broad, phrase and exact searches. Perhaps even you were like me, thinking that I could use those excellent tools to find Niche Market products. Well, you probably can if you have an enormous amount of time, but a total newbie using specific niche software would blow us all out of the water due to the specificity of those tools now.

A specialty software tool will use those numbers and up to two dozen or more variables, including rating scores on competition based not only on whether the key words show up in the sites ( which is not necessarily competitive ) but also whether the keywords are in the url, the domain or titles. The same tool might also check for commercial or non-commercial articles for article publishing as well as opening clickbank for affiliate products and opening up other affiliate product searches to verify that there are related affiliate products. And this might be 1/10th of what a commercial niche tool based product might do for you.

Why anyone would want to search for niche products the old manual way is really beyond me. Save yourself some time have a look at a few potential products that you can use. There is a list on my site.