Selecting A Niche Correctly

Your research phase is where it all starts. This is the ground floor that your OTP network is built upon. Without a good foundation, things start to crumble. You do need to put some effort into niche research to create web pages that the search engines will want to show to their searchers. It will also help in letting the search engines know what your site is about.

The first step you should take is to find a niche or topic that will allow you to make money. This is more than finding a single product that can be sold. You need to know that there are several products that can be sold so that you can alter the offer at times. Sometimes products go out of favor or disappear altogether. You want to know that you have several other offers to use so that all the work and time you spend creating your Traffic Network doesn’t go to waste. It’s also worth looking to see if the niche looks lucrative. You want a niche that is focused but still has many people searching for it.

In choosing a niche, you must remember that the search engines are now looking for websites that are authorities on the topics covered on their sites. In order to be an authority, you must cover all the possible aspects of your niche. This is often more difficult than most believe until they do enough research to see what is involved in that niche. After doing the initial research, you will be better able to decide if you should do what you initially chose or to narrow your focus to a sub-niche. It will be much easier to accomplish the task of covering all areas of your niche by keeping it very focused.

The true definition of a niche market is a small category of a larger market that can be directly addressed by a single marketing message. For example, “Pets” is a very large market. When you promote offers in this market, they are normally much more focused. Also, in order to be deemed an authority in pets, you would need to be an authority for every possible type of pet. This would be a very large task. So you could then choose “dog training” as a sub-niche of the Pets market. But when you research dog training, you will find out that there are multiple methods to train dogs. This too would be a very large task. Also, when someone is searching for “dog training”, they are typically trying to find out more about it and what ways to do it. So this sub-niche’s intent isn’t necessarily ready to purchase. So we niche down even further into a sub-niche such as “clicker training for dogs”. Now when you put your marketing message on the OTP site, you will be able to talk to all searchers landing on that page about the exact topic they searched for and clicked through to your page. It gives the searcher the confidence that you are talking specifically about the topic he searched for. This will give your marketing efforts a much better chance to be successful. It is more targeted and less competitive.

One way you can check how in demand and stable your niche is, is to check Google trends  at https://trends.google.com. For our OTP networks we are looking for more evergreen niches not fads. This is because it takes time to build organic traffic and we want the efforts we put into our traffic network to work for a long time. And by making our traffic network about a very specific niche, we can easily change what offer we send our traffic to. What we are doing is to build a more long term and sustainable business.

Other information to search for is if there are companies investing in advertising for this sub-niche? If you see their ads on the search pages you are looking at for your sub-niche, that’s a good sign. Companies only continue to invest in ads when they are making money from them from people who are searching for the same sub-niche that you’re interested in.

Are there a lot of keywords for your sub-niche? If you use the Locustware Keyword Tool – LKT (in the Locustware Control Panel) you often find many thousands of related keywords for your niche. By scanning through this list, you can find some great ideas for sub-niches of sub-niches. Now you’re really drilling down and finding some gold.

Do a Google search for your sub-niche and see if there are different products being offered. Go to those sites and check them out. How big of a brand are these sites? How much authority do they have? Are there a few high authority competing sites or are there hundreds of high authority competing sites? You may need to drill down in your niche even further if you see lots of authority sites on first page. LKT is a huge help in drilling down.

By going to those sites you may also find other related keywords that you can use that are less competitive that you didn’t know about.

If you can’t think of a niche to go into you can look at the categories in places like ClickBank, Amazon, Flippa, magazines.com, TV ads, Google suggest, 43Things.com, etc.

A word of caution when selecting what to offer first rather than choosing a niche. We have seen a large number of people start this way in the past and they were not able to truly define the niches that they were marketing to. Most products serve multiple niches. It’s because of this that advertisers created niche marketing decades ago. The would create marketing messages that spoke to a very small part of their total market because that message would be more in line with that group of prospects. For example, let’s say we talk about binoculars. When you think about it, you are not in the binocular niche because your message could not speak directly to the person who used them for a specific purpose. Where are binoculars used? For boating, at a football field, bird watching, etc. I’m sure doing a little keyword research you could likely find many dozens of niches where binoculars are used. You would want to focus on the bigger ones and create a Traffic Network for each. This would allow be an authority in each of those niches. And you could promote different products for each that matched that niche better.