Imagine a bell-shaped curve. Now, shift your curve over to the left so that there’s a big long tail trailing off to the right. This is the power of niche marketing.

The big curve on the left is the place where the majority of the money is made in a particular market. For example, if you’re selling health supplements (and who isn’t?) the big curve is the general market that buys health supplements.

As the tail curves off to the right, that curve shows the declining interest in the market. These are the “long tail searches” or “long tail keywords.” For you – this is the niche market.

The big curve represents the key words like “health supplements” and “weight loss pills.” 80 percent of searches are for general terms like that. It’s a big market with lots of competition.

On down the curve you’ll start to find the more specific searches for things like “prenatal health supplements” or “gluten-free health supplements.” Let’s not forget “caffeine-free diet pills” and “diet pills for diabetics.” The list is endless, which is why the curve never fully disappears.

What is Niche Marketing?

Niche marketing is a smaller version of general marketing. In general marketing, you’re going to do your best to sell every person on the planet health supplements and diet pills.

This strategy works for some companies, but they are big companies who have large marketing budgets. It’s probably not your company – it’s one that’s been around awhile.

So you start smaller – looking for those little niches that suit the keywords that aren’t as popular. For example, “prenatal health supplements” is interesting.

Pregnant moms who work out? Good niche. Or perhaps “diet pills for diabetics”. Individuals looking for supplements to help manage diabetes? Another good niche.

Making Niche Marketing Work for You

So now you must simply make the niche marketing work for you to boost your ecommerce profits.

1. Identify your general market. You have to know the big market so that you can then focus on the smaller one. Identify the big market out there and figure out who the customers are in the big picture.

2. Identify the competition. Who are the companies that seem to be everywhere in the general market? You won’t want to take on a big player early on, but perhaps down the road when you’re more established. In the meantime, take notes on who shows up the most in the search listings and results.

3. Do your keyword research. There are numerous research tools. Put one to use to start pilfering out those long-tail keywords. Ignore the big “health supplements” and look for things like “gluten-free health supplements” or “diet pills for diabetics.”

4. Select a niche. Use those long tail keywords to divine out a true niche. Who’s searching for gluten-free health supplements? What niche would that be?

5. Flesh out your niche. Sometimes a niche can be too narrow. There may only be thirty people in a million searching for a particular long-tail keyword. That means the niche may be too narrow to do much in. If this is the case, you may need to expand your reach a bit to include other search terms and possibilities that are easily harmonious.

6. Find your niche buyers. Once you have your niche and your starting keywords that drove you to the niche, who are you actually selling to? Type in the search term and see what sort of results come up? Are there forums where you can read what potential buyers or sellers are discussing? Are there blogs where potential customers are describing their experiences?

It is your job to learn your customers, and the better you know them, the more effectively you can sell to them. Are you dealing primarily with men or women? What age group are they? Are they shopping for themselves, their children or their aging parents? Read, learn, research and learn some more.

7. Investigate the competition. Who else is selling in this niche? What are they selling? If there’s already a big player in the field – the big guns who dominate the whole industry – you may want to consider a new niche for now, but if it’s just another small player or no players at all, this could be your moment to shine.

8. Build your website. It’s time to put all of that research to work. Build a website that appeals your target market. Pregnant women will be drawn to one sort of site. Baby Boomers staring down diabetes are looking for something totally different. Design your site using your research and learning to guide you.

9. Test your site. Once your site is up and running, start testing it in your market. Install monitors on the site to check your statistics and analytics. How many people visit? How many people buy? What pages do people click on? It may take some time initially to gather information as you have to wait for the site to be indexed in the search engines.

10. Fine-tune your site SEO. Once you get your first page of copy up there and aging online, start doing your fine-tuning. Do some serious SEO research to learn how important keyword placement can be on the page. Work through your website text again to be sure you’re targeting those niche keywords effectively.

11. Do a split test. With your SEO in place, put the revised website up live for a time. Record the same analytics you were looking for earlier. How does the new site compare? Modify and continue split testing to find the perfect balance for your niche market.

12. Use social media. There is a huge amount that social media can do in a niche market. Pregnant women talk to other pregnant women. Baby Boomers likely read similar blogs and are friends with each other. Look into the various opportunities on Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, Youtube and Twitter to reach your target market.

13. Try unconventional means. Being in a niche market means you can do what the niche does. If you notice that a lot of potential clients enjoy a particular forum, join up and become part of the community. A nicely placed signature line can be a great marketing tool. Check out eBay and Amazon – is there something on there you can sell to help reach some of your niche?

14. Try conventional means. Some niches respond nicely to more conventional means. Baby boomers still read magazines. They are more likely to have a landline for their phone. They get a lot of mail. So why not try magazine ads, direct phone calls and mailers if they suit your product and market?

15. Don’t fear change. Niche markets require a great deal of tweaking and modifying to find the sweet spot for commerce. Don’t be afraid to make small changes and keep testing the results. If you find that your niche is simply not responsive, don’t throw good effort after a dead market. Change your tactics, salvage what you can and move on to another possibility.

16. Scale up when it’s time. After you’ve established one strong niche showing, it’s time to scale up. You can do this in two ways – you may be able to target new keywords in much the same way by building similar sites for those pregnant exercising moms after your mastered the diabetic Baby Boomer niche, for example. Or you may scale up and start shooting for a more general market.

17. Always monitor. Niche markets are susceptible to the shifts and changes in the marketplace. Search engines can be fickle and new changes and algorithms can take you to the top and drop you off the charts in the same day. Never have more niche sites than you can effectively monitor – you must care for your niche marketing efforts to earn the maximum profits, after all.

About the Guest Blogger – Uttoran Sen is an expert on ecommerce website building and marketing it. Making niche sites and marketing them to profit is one of those few things that he really loves doing on the internet.


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