Niche Research - Essential For Success
Author: Rachel Marx

Whenever you create a website or blog, the first step is always niche research. Not only is it the most important step in the process, it's also one that you cannot change once you've created the website. If you choose a bad product to promote, switching it with another product is relatively easy to do. The same can't be said for the niche. When performing niche research, there are a few criteria that you should keep in mind. Failing to follow these criteria can render a campaign useless or yield very low profits at most.

Is It Really That Vital?

In short, yes. If you have ever created a website where you had followed all the steps correctly, had it ranking well on the search engines, and wondered why it wasn't generating the profits that it was supposed to, then there's a good chance that you didn't do niche research properly. It can be very easy to overlook this step, since most people tend to focus on building their website and then getting ranked highly for their keywords. Once their site gets some traffic, they wonder why it isn't converting. The likely reason is that the niche within their website is not one where there are lots of "buyers." Niche marketing can be tough to figure out, but it does get easier with experience.

So How Do You Do It?

When performing niche research, there are a few characteristics that the niche should have:

• It should be an "evergreen" niche. Avoid short-lived niches that are trends or fads.
• Make sure that there is a large enough audience or your site will suffer from lack of traffic.
• Try to target a niche with a passionate audience. Niches with highly passionate visitors are more likely to generate money.
• Don't run from competition. In fact, competition can be a good indicator that the niche is profitable.
• Ask yourself the question, "How can I make an offer?" Avoid niches where you cannot think of a way to make an offer to your visitors.

If you do niche marketing research with these points in mind, you are much more likely to find a market that is profitable. When you do your keyword research, you should also be using long tail keywords, which are more targeted. Depending on the type of keywords you choose, conversions can be very low or very high. In general, you will want to go for "buyer" keywords or any keywords that are clearly seeking to solve a problem. I personally find that using software can help a lot with researching your niche and keywords, and cut down on a lot of time. My favourite software for niche research is Niche Finder, which is an excellent application. It gives you just enough information, unlike some software that tend to overload you with (unnecessary) information. When you search for a keyword, it will return an extremely helpful list of long tailed keywords related to your search query. You can tell exactly how competitive a keyword will be with this software, which has saved a ton of time and headache. Regardless of whether or not you use software for niche research, you should still devote a reasonable amount of time to it - the results that you get back from good niche research will be tenfold.

Concluding Thoughts

By now, it should be clear that niche marketing research is crucial to the success of your website. This is one of the most important decisions that you will make for your campaign. Once you pick your niche, it cannot be changed after you've built your site. Focus on picking potentially profitable niches with a large audience. Niches where people are trying to solve a problem or where there is a lot of passion are usually the ones that make the most money. Once you've done niche marketing research properly and selected a profitable niche, you will have taken the first step towards success.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/niche-research-essential-for-success-5126258.html

About the Author

For more information on niche research, please visit Niche Research.