If you have heard of the Internet marketing business for quite some time, then you already know that niche marketing is one of the most popular methods of making money online. Best of all, this market is nowhere near saturation because of the ever-increasing demand for quality information.

So let us quickly look at how you can select a niche that pays.

Choosing THE right product from a hot list of products is probably the most difficult thing for a marketer. Coming up with an idea that sells is something that gives jitters even to the experts. Here are a few things you can do to improve your chances.

Keep your eyes open: The first thing to do is to spend some time surfing the net. Look at ads on websites. What products are they selling? Visit blogs and look at the “paid sponsors” section. Watch the news and read papers. See what products are being offered on the market right now. Search for a keyword and see what comes up in the search engines. Visit websites like google.com/trends or wordtracker.com and look up the demand for keywords you like. Watch TV and find what products are selling hot. Market research is vital to finding the right niche.

Look inwards: What ideas do you have in your head? Are your ideas already on sale? Explore new ideas and new angles of old ideas. Can you come up with a better idea and beat your competition?

Turn to ClickBank: Just as their tag suggests, ClickBank is the world’s biggest marketplace. So, they have a finger on the pulse of the market. If it is selling hot, it will be on ClickBank. Visit their website and click on “Buy products”. This will open up a large category of products. Clicking on any of these categories will take you to the sub-categories of that category. Click on any of the sub-categories and see what kinds of products are selling in that niche. Read through the sales pages of these products and discover their USP. This will give you a good idea of what you should select.

Once you have identified your niche, half of your business structure is in place. But you need to build the other half too.

The power of niche marketing comes from the fact that the market consists of consumers looking for a particular product. Even if you develop a product, you can’t succeed till you shine a torch on the fact that you are the best in your field. You need to reach out to people.

For this, it is essential that you know your target audience. Knowing who you are marketing to, makes it easy for you to channel your energy and marketing $$ only on that section of people.

For example, take a car dealership. The first thing you have to decide is where the dealership is located. If it is in New York, chances of consumers coming from Seattle to buy from you are less. So, narrow your focus to people within a 50-mile radius. This increases your chances of clinching a sale.

Defining your target audience helps you to:

• Maximize your profit by targeting a defined market. Your efforts will no longer be like a shot in the dark.
• You can optimize your search engine accordingly, so your customers can easily find you.
• You can offer solutions specific to your niche.
• This makes it easy for you to develop new ideas for supporting products.
• It is easier for you to dominate the market if you know the dynamics of your niche.

This should give you a good idea of how to develop a niche and become the expert of your field.

Now that you have the product, it is time to market it. Niche marketing can be done in two ways: Membership websites and websites with no up front charges.

Membership websites obviously ask for a fee upfront, before they give members access to their site. This is a recurring income business model where members keep renewing their subscriptions if they are happy with the product you offer.

Websites without an up front charge are a little different. They offer the cake free of cost and tell members to pay up for the icing. If you like the cake well enough, you will pay for the icing.

Popularity: 38% [?]

One of the main reasons why so many membership sites fall flat on their faces is due to lack of expertise in their selected niche.

For people to visit your website AND pay for information, you have to be the expert. Why would anyone pay you otherwise?

The moment someone mentions your area of expertise, your name must pop up in people’s heads. Easier said than done, you say? Listen up, it is not that difficult.

Before you select your niche, there are certain things you can do to make it easier for you to become the expert.

• Evaluate your expertise. Why should people pay to listen to you?
• Who is your target audience? Students, businesspersons, executives, investors or work-at-home moms? Determine their gender, backgrounds, income level, interests, professional and educational backgrounds. This will tell you what unique angle you should explore in your website.
• How good is the competition? What areas are they exploring? Do they know more or less?

By the time you have answered these questions, you already know where you stand. Listed below are some things you can do to become THE expert in your field.

Read: Read all kinds of material - books, forums, blogs or magazines. Forums are a great place to find enthusiastic questions, diverse answers and innovative ideas. Sometimes, you can even pick up hot information on new products from various forums.

Narrow your focus: Suppose you picked self-improvement as your area of expertise. You know that this niche is simply too vast for one person to do full justice to it. So you narrow your scope and take up one aspect, say ’stop smoking’. Good. You are now targeting a specific group of people. But, how about narrowing it down to ’stop smoking using herbal supplements’? Haven’t you just chopped off more than half the competition and targeted an even more specific group of people? Can you begin to see how narrowing a field down to its sub-topic will make the subject manageable and not overly competitive? It is much easier to dominate a narrow field of interest.

Speak whenever you get the chance: More than 95% of the population develops nervous ticks when they stand up to speak. So, the moment you walk up to that microphone, you are already ahead of 95% of your competition! Speaking about your topic establishes you as the indisputable expert in your niche. The next best thing to do is to give interviews. This neat technique wins you the label of an expert, free advertisement and increased traffic.

Write: There’s a public perception that only an expert can write well. This is more so if you are writing a book. So, get busy and write a book on your niche. If you can’t do it yourself, go for second best: hire a ghostwriter. Write good, read-worthy, thought provoking articles and send it out to ezines and other websites. This is the easiest way to get free publicity. Submit press releases that pique people’s interest. In short, generate EXTRA-ordinary content. Only this can establish your expertise.

Network like your life depends on it: Create a bulletin board, start a blog and visit related forums. Attend networking events where your clients hang out. Remember, it’s not who you know that is important, it is who knows *you* that counts!

So, there you have it!

Formula for expertise = Consistent great content + continuous online presence.

Popularity: 25% [?]