A niche market can be defined as a market within a larger market segment whose needs can be very targeted. Typically, a niche market is too small for the big boys to be interested in so the competition will be manageable for the less established players. Niche marketing is simply marketing that is targeted at a niche market.

Online, niche marketing usually refers to the technique of entering a niche market in which the search engine competition is low compared to the potential or profitability of the market. Usually, you will go about it in this way:

* Research keywords that a surfer will use to find what they want. Look out for those particular keywords which has a good potential for profit and not a lot of competition in the search engine rankings.

* Build a website to target those keywords.

* Use on-page SEO techniques to optimize the website for the targeted keywords.

* Get inbound links to your site or blog by submitting articles to the article directories. In addition, you can also network with other webmasters and get links between your sites or blogs.

* Keep building those anchored backlinks until you get to the number one spot in Google, or at least to the top of the first page.

I have outlined the basic steps above but you will probably have to mix and match as necessary. Niche marketing is definitely not an exact science and you have to adjust accordingly.

Investment Needed

The only thing that I think you really must pay for is your web hosting and your domain name. A web hosting account that allows multiple domains goes for about $10 a month. A domain name costs about $10 a year, or less than $1 per month.

You might also want to consider some other services which can enhance your productivity and, in the longer term, give you a better return on the time and effort that you invested:

* You can choose to write all the content yourself but it is time consuming. If you have the budget, you can consider getting a writer or writers for at least some of your content.

* Services that automate the submission of your articles to article directories, blogs and websites.

* Exchanging links with other webmasters can become a breeze if you subscribe to services that brings together webmasters interested in link exchange. Some of the paid services comes with scripts that you install on your website so that the whole link exchange process is quite automated.

Skills Required

You will need at least passable skills in the English language. If you can write with minimal grammatical and spelling errors, and you can get your message across clearly, that should be good enough.

There is a lot of computer and web related work to do. On the computer, you might find yourself touching up some graphics, or installing a software application, or even doing some html. On the web, you would probably need to update your name servers and configure your hosting account. You don’t need to be an expert to do all these, but some level of computer literacy would be needed.

Niche marketing cannot be seen as just a sales job but must be seen in the larger context of a business. And by its very definition, each business is unique. Although I have broken niche marketing into a few simple steps, you must look at those steps as an integrated whole, that is, as a business. As a niche marketer, you are not a salesman but a businessman.

Tags: Business, home based business, Internet, Internet Business, Internet Marketing, Marketing, niche marketing, online business, small business