One of the surest ways of generating a healthy long-term income online is by targeting a niche market and serving them well.

But what is a niche market?

A niche market is a specific group of people with similar interests, wants and needs

Here is my simple definition: "A niche market is a specific group of people with similar interests, wants and needs." 

The benefit of targeting a niche market rather than a general market is it allows you to provide specific "tailor made" solutions to these people. 

From a marketer’s perspective, this is perfect as it allows you to add value to and profit from a niche market in just a couple of months rather than years – because you don’t have to spend years understanding the entire range of issues related to a more general market. 

For example, let’s look at the "golf" market.

 

It is certainly tempting, especially for beginners to want to target a large market like "golf".

After all, who doesn’t want to make BIG MONEY?

But what most people don’t seem to understand is that a large market like "golf" is typically dominated by BIG PLAYERS with huge and deep pockets.

To illustrate, let’s take a look at the top 10 "golf" listings in Google:

Firstly, notice there are over 605 million competiting web page in Google for "golf"!

(Allintitle: competition is 34.5 million – this is huge serious competition!)

Side note: For a detailed explanation on the concept of allintitle: competition, please read my blog post on long-tail keywords.

So forget about targeting a highly lucrative and highly competitive niche market like "golf".

If you really want to target a golf-related niche, you need to drill-down and locate a "sub" golf niche where there is less heavy competition, for example, the "used golf clubs" niche:

"Used golf clubs" is searched close to 500 times a day – just 10% of the search volume for golf, but the competition is also far lower, with an allintitle: competition of 14,900 compared with the allintitle competition of 34.5 million for "golf":

So, targeting the "used golf clubs" niche is certainly achieveable – and the only question that remains is whether you have the skills to get your website ranked in the top 10 listings of Google.

Of course it is very possible to build and dominate a niche using just paid traffic i.e. using pay-per-click advertising - but in the long-term, you want to ensure you are getting free targeted traffic via the search engines as well via search engine optimization.

And to this end, you need to the target long-tail keywords in your niche so that you can drive maximum traffic and sales.

In the "used golf clubs" example, I’d start targeting long-tail keywords like "used mizuno golf clubs", "left handed golf clubs" etc.

Remember, optimize one long-tail keyword PER web page only.

Lastly, if the niche you plan to target does not have PPC advertisers, this is a warning sign that the niche in question may not be as profitable as you think.

Because other than advertising revenue (e.g. Google AdSense) if you want to really profit from a niche, you need to either offer or recommend products or services to the niche. 

And since PPC advertising is one of the best ways to promote a product or service online, the presence of PPC ads suggests a profitable niche market exists and others are already profiting from the market

…the presence of PPC ads suggests a profitable niche market exists – and others re already profiting from the niche

All you need to do is study your competition carefully and research products and services that are being offered in the niche market.

And then, simply reverse-engineer your competition!

In summary, here are 3 tips to identifying a profitable niche market:

1) Don’t target highly lucrative and highly competitive markets

2) Do drill-down and locate a profitable sub-niche with medium to low competition instead

3) Look out for the presence of PPC ads as it is an indication the niche is likely to be a profitable one.

Happy niche hunting!

Fabian Lim

====================================
Fabian Lim is CEO of Asia Search Engine Academy and certified in Advanced Search Engine Optimization Strategies. He is Search Engine Workshop’s first International Search Engine Associate authorized to conduct SEO training outside the USA. Sign-up for our SEO Tips Newsletter and receive a FREE ebook ‘Wordtracker Magic’ along with valuable Free SEO Tips! For more information, visit: ttp://www.AsiaSearchEngineAcademy.com. 
====================================

Webmasters: Feel free to use the above article as content on your blog or website as long as the content is not altered in anyway and the resource box is included. Thanks!

Popularity: 3% [?]