In any conversation about niche marketing, it should start with the word: targeting. The phrases, to target, to focus, are worthy of mentioning too. Let me divert for a second.

I am not a hunter but if I were, and I was hunting deer, and my choice of weapons were either a scatter-gun or a rifle. Remember, I can\’t get closer then a couple of hundred feet. I\’m thinking I should choose the rifle. SCATTERED HITS versus FOCUSED HITS.

The most successful small businesses understand that only a limited number of people will buy their products or services. The task at hand becomes determining as closely as possible exactly who those people are and then targeting your marketing efforts and dollars towards them.

You need to target your audience in a specific manner as soon as your target is in focus.

Now you know what you must do in order to succeed. Let\’s do some research and see what the search engine About.com has to say about a niche market. About.com says, “A niche market is a focused, target-able portion of a market.” ie Sports(the market)football (the target market of sports) pro-football (a target market of football) and so on. About com goes further, “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. You can think of a niche market as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.

Looking deeper, I seek out what Wikipedia the free encyclopedia, has to say. It says that a niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing; therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact.

Wikipedia further states that “Some niches may become saturated with marketers, increasing competition and thus, according to the economic law of supply and demand, reducing the slice of the pie available to each competitor. One solution is to find smaller, “undiscovered,” but still profitable niches, usually by searching out themselves the best keywords to target. These lower cost keywords are called long-tailed keywords,as in the long tail of secondary keyword phrases that usually follow the main keyword in popularity of number of searches conducted by internet users. Some are too obscure and may have very few or even no clicks per month, and therefore not much use to target This technique can be repeated across several niche websites until a desired income level is achieved.

Your mindset from henceforth is to be aware of trends and current events in the real world. Read newspapers and magazines, both general and niche specific. Watch news programs and listen to the radio, these are ways to getting the “juices flowing”. At times something will just click and the light will go on.

At some point, develop several broad ideas and perform research on the ideas. Before you make your decision on the path to follow, make sure there is a good market for the product that you plan to promote before advertising it.

Author Bio: Alphonso Smith is a founding member of The New-bie Nation supporting, promoting and advocating issues pertaining to the success and well-being of New-bies in the Internet Marketing industy. Mr. Smith is also contributing writer @ http://www.new-bienation.blogspot.com

Category: Marketing
Keywords: internet marketing,niche,niche marketing,target,focus,make money online,home based business