I wanted to post something really helpful for readers today, so I’m going to give you the best tip I ever received when first starting out online, “pick your niche”. Whether your web site is a commercial project or even a non-commercial blog it’s a good idea to recognize your niche early on and try to keep your content focused to it.
Nobody wants to read ramblings that are all over the place. Even though personal blogs may seem like–and often get described as–an online journal or diary, the truth is if your readers don’t know what to generally expect to find on it they won’t be bothered with keeping up with it. But if you identify your niche and stay focused to it you’ll be rewarded with a loyal group of readers. And remember, a niche can be wide ranging, it doesn’t have to be highly limiting to you, it just has to be clearly established. For example, the niche for this site is “online business”, that covers a vast range of areas that I’m able to touch upon while still staying true to the overall theme, but it also lets folks know that they probably won’t find information about Horse Racing or Kite Flying here.
Obviously for commercial projects it is even more crucial to identify and define your niche for site visitors, and typically with commercial projects the more narrowly defined your niche is the better. If you are making money from your site the odds are that you’re spending money on it too, usually in marketing, and you’ll spend less money for higher results if you market “red, balsa wood widgets for sale” than if you’re marketing to broad and general topics or terms such as just “widgets”.
Once you find your niche the real work begins. You have to identify keywords that will work for both product branding and marketing campaigns. You’ll likely want to review your competition in the niche and possibly build reports of what online marketing you believe is working for them, as well as what’s not.
There’s tons of market research to be done, Google isn’t the end of the Internet and it’s important to remember that fortunes are being made by web sites that aren’t even listed in Google right now. Yahoo and MSN can provide high volumes of qualified traffic to a site, and if your site is designed well for conversions you can do very well without any Google traffic at all. Remember, making money with a commercial site is all about sales, not traffic.
So, researching your competition means finding how they rank and market themselves everywhere online, and trying to spot what’s working or not for them to capitalize on the good and avoid wasting time and money on the bad.
There are numerous books about how to research and utilize niche marketing, and tons of tools available for assisting in all of this work. To try to offer a comprehensive guide on niche research is beyond the scope of this posting, but may be a series of posts I’ll do in the future.
What I can offer is my opinion on one of the tools I like for helping in niche researching and marketing. It’s called Niche Detector, and does a lot of the “leg work” for you. From finding quality keywords to exploring keyword/key phrase manipulations you might not have thought of on your own. It will also show you what your competition is doing. It is a real time saver.
Niche Detector isn’t the only tool to use–there are no All-In-One pots of gold out there–but when starting a new project or revisiting an existing one I’d say it should be the first tool you use.
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I agree finding your niche is essential for online businesses
Eric
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