What is a niche market?

A niche market is a market that is focusing on a specific product or product range. Niches can be divided into several categories depending on how specific they are. There are broad niches right though to extremely specific sub-niches. We will use pets as an example.

The niche “pets” covers an extremely broad range of topics from dogs, cats, horses or rabbits to such things as reptiles or even bird-eating spiders. Of these topics “dogs” is still a very broad niche, whereas “bird-eating spiders” is much more specific dealing with only one particular animal.

We can drill down – this just means making a broad niche narrower – in the dog niche to such things as “dog training”, “feeding your dog”, “show dogs” or “dog accessories”. I’m sure you can think of many more.

Taking it one step further in “dog accessories” you could have “dog beds”, “dog coats”. “dog collars” and many others as well.

Even more specific in “dog collars” there are such topics as “dog training collars”, “designer dog collars” or even “diamante dog collars”.

So as you can see, niches can be extremely specific. Just by exploring the one extremely wide niche “pets”, we have defined sixteen other sub-niches without too much effort. The trick is to choose a niche that is not so narrow that there won’t be a demand and not so broad that you get lost in the crowd.

What sort of research do I need to do?

Once you have chosen a niche you need to do some keyword research. A keyword is something that an internet user types into a search engine to find information on the subject they are interested in. Most people type in more than one word when they are searching, such as “using dog training collars” or “dog beds for large dogs”. These are also known as long-tail keywords. There are many free keyword research tools available to help you in your research.

When researching keywords, you will want to find words that are searched for on a regular basis, but that don’t have so much competition that you can’t get a good search engine ranking. Search engine ranking is where your website or page appears on the list of sites that the search engine returns when you do a search. Ideally you want your promotion to show up in the first three results that are shown. At the very least you want them on the first page.