Creating Your Niche
In the third of our series of informative articles on discovering the honest way to earn an income online, we look at creating your own niche to get into.
In the previous article, we looked at finding a niche to build your own internet business on. As a way of making it a simpler method to follow, I decided to select a niche for us and will be working with it to create an online business from it. I selected as my niche, health. The online business we will be promoting is selling affiliate products for that niche, which is "alternative health products".
So first of all and before we go tumbling headlong into setting up our website, we must do some research. This is because even though I already have a great interest in a certain side of health and also a fair bit of knowledge on the subject, we still need to learn more about what we will be promoting. We need to be completely up to speed on our niche, because a big part of creating success in that online business will come from writing about it.
Writing Articles
That's right, writing articles on the subject of our niche will make or break our business. It really is that important.
You might notice from this series, that I am writing articles about "The Honest Way to Earn an Income Online" because it is these articles that will increase the readability of this site and also be a huge aid in promoting it. Therefore I need to know plenty about my niche in order to be able to write about it.
Another reason we will need to know as much as possible about our niche is that we will need to know if it has a big enough potential customer base online and if those potential customers are searching on our specific niche and how often.
This is where it starts to get interesting.
A Sub-Niche
Although the niche we have selected is that of health, health itself is far too wide a subject to fit into any one online business. That is unless you have the resources to cover just about everything to do with health - most people don't. So you have to narrow it down a bit and discover a sub-niche that focuses on your main interest. I decided that my main interests in health actually lie in the field of alternative medicines and cures. I am a qualified hypnotherapist and have been since 1994, so I have quite a few years experience in that side of alternative health. But that is not the niche that I will be working with here. I have my own hypnosis site but that is one where mainly I promote my own products in self help hypnosis CDs and MP3s.
So for the purposes of this series of articles, I will select a different niche to promote affiliate products. In keeping with my knowledge and interests, I have decided upon setting up an Alternative Remedies niche, to promote and sell affiliate products related to alternative cures and remedies. You don't have to set up the same niche as me, of course. Your interests will most likely be in another totally different area, but the principle will be the same.
So in having decided on exactly which niche we plan to promote, we will have to draw up an action plan.
Competition
First of all, we will need to know what my competition looks like. The easiest way to do this is to go to one of the main search engines (Google being the number one) and seeing how many sites there are listed under alternative cures. To do this with some kind of accuracy, we will work with the keywords (I'll explain them later) "alternative health". Well, Google found 1,230,000 sites for that keyword search. That might sound like you are going up against a mountain of competition, but there is a thing about Google that you should know.
If you go into their advanced search options and set the pages displayed to 100, then do your search, then at the bottom of the page you click on page 10, a very strange thing happens. At the bottom of the pages displayed, Google puts out this message:
"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 849 already displayed".
In other words, that competing 1,230,000 web pages has actually shrunk to just 849. The rest of the 1.2 million pages are either duplicates or of little relevance to the keywords you just searched.
So now you have more of a fighting chance. With the information I will be giving you in future articles, you will learn how to put this little known feature to good use in your own internet marketing strategy.
In the next article, we will see how to use the information on the search engines about the competition in our niche to plan your strategy and then to start obtaining information to put on the website that you will soon begin to build.
NEXT ARTICLE #3 >> Narrowing Keyword Research
[TOP]