What is a “Niche”?

Wikipedia says this:

“A niche market is a focused targetable portion (subset) of a market.

By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. A niche market may be thought of as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.”

How To Find A Niche

Before you find your niche you first either find a product then look for a niche market  or find your niche market then find a product for your niche. Either way is fine,  just pick the one that works best for you.

Let’s say you found a ebook on clickbank you wanted to promote and it’s about losing weight. If you run with losing weight , you’ll get hammered because it’s an industry not a niche. To find a niche within your industry just ask yourself “why “. Why do people want to lose weight?

• Getting married
• Want to look good at the beach
• New Years resolution
• Health issues - diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure
• Want to lose the weight gained after giving birth

If you can answer the “WHY “, you’ll find your niche! You can also drill down in your niche and find sub-niches. Take health issues from above; health issues is a niche but you can further break it down into the different health issues like heart disease or diabetes. The further you go down into sub-niches, the further you get away from your main niche, health issues, and the less competition you will probably have.

How Do You Come Up With A Product

To find a product/niche start with what you are interested in, flying, golfing, hiking. There’s a product, an ebook or audio book that you can promote on just about any niche you come up with.

Let’s take hiking. Go to Google search engine and type in “affiliate program +hiking”, you’ll get something like this:

You can do this with any idea you have to locate an affiliate program for that product. You can also do a search on the different networks such as clickbank, CJ, paydotcom, etc… to locate an affiliate program in your niche.

How Do You Come Up With A Idea

Other ways to come up with ideas. Just listen to the people around you, the radio, news papers and magazine. I just heard a radio commercial for migraine and cluster headaches. I new a guy who got cluster headaches, he would have sold his first born to get relief (luckily he had no kids). Go to Google, type in “affiliate program +cluster headaches” and you’ll find some affiliate programs there to promote for a niche market.

Get into the habit of looking for niches. When you see or hear of something that gives you an idea jot it down on paper (I carry a digital voice recorder, I do alot of driving which makes writing things down difficult and dangerous). Don’t skip this step. If you skip it, you’ll forget it, Jot It Down !

Tools

A tool that I use alot is “Micro Niche Finder “, this tool you’ll have to buy but it has alot of uses (I’ll be posting on this to give you an idea of it’s power).

If you want an excelent How-To eBook on PPC, I highly recommend Beating Adware! Absolutely the BEST eBook on the topic of PPC.

What is PPC

PPC stands for Pay Per Click the three leading PPC are:

Google - AdWords
Yahoo - Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM)
Microsoft - adCenter

in that order.

When you are doing a Google search, the ads on the right side of the page are the PPC ads.

Here’s the skinning:

you create the ad (how to create ads will be discussed later in this series)
When someone does a search and triggers one of your keywords your ad gets displayed
When someone clicks on your ad you get charged a small fee and they go to your landing page or affiliate page. If they buy your product, you get paid (this is how you pay for your PPC fee)

Why Use PPC

With PPC you have the potential of making money within minutes of placing your ads. Whereas with article marketing and web page SEO, it takes time, weeks even months before making any money. A good Internet Marketer will use a combination of all three. You’ll also need to generate backlinks, Web 2.0, forum posting and other strategies to promote your site. The idea here is to generate traffic to your site in hopes of making sales on your products.

Later in this series we will be covering:

• Finding your niche
• Researching your audience
• Keyword research
• How to build and place an ad

These are some of the main topics and each one can and will be broken down into subtopics.

A word of caution! You can make alot of money using PPC BUT you can also lose alot of money with PPC if done incorrectly. Do your research on PPC and understand it well before you jump in. One product I highly recommend is Beating Adwords . You will have an excellent understanding of PPC after reading Beating Adwords.

One more final note. Member of Wealthy Affiliate University can sign up for a Pay-Per-Click Marketing Accreditation Course . If you take this course, you will receive Beating Adwords as additional reading for the course so don’t pay for it if you plan on taking the course. If your not a member of WAU and wish to become a member, you can click here to join.

Till next time…