Business at Home Income Blog

You hear about it all the time, but what exactly is a niche?  It’s more than just something having to do with walls or the ecology.  It’s your key to profitable blogging.

Niche Definition

When it comes to the internet and blogs or websites, the niche definition is a site that focuses on a topic…a precise topic.  It’s small, has fewer keywords, with a smaller audience.

The keywords tend to be more along the line of “low hanging fruit” — keywords that don’t have a ton of searches, but also have little in the way of competition.

Examples of Niche Markets

If you’re saying, “Sure, right – but show me one,” how about some examples to demonstrate?  Hopefully these will help you to define in your mind what a niche really is.  Let’s take two examples:  travel and cars, as examples of niche “markets”.

The Travel Niche

Travel is an awfully broad subject, and the little guy has pretty much no chance of ranking well for keywords like “travel” or “vacations” — the terms are just way too broad.

So let’s whittle it down some.  How about “Florida vacations”?  Now we’re focusing on vacations in one state.  But,  that’s still too broad for our purposes.  So how about “Orlando Florida vacations”?.

Well, that might still be a bit broad — lots of searches for Orlando (“vacation central”).  So whittle it down again — hotels in Orlando Florida.  Now we’re starting to get niche-y.  But we can still narrow the focus even more if we try for vacation hotels in Orlando Florida that are near Disney World.

(Actually, knowing Orlando, this can be narrowed even more…but you might see it easier in the next example.)

The Car Niche

So you’ve got an idea of what a niche is — let’s apply it to cars, which are as you might guess, way too broad.  So let’s think about a manufacturer:  Chevrolet for this example.

Still too broad — Chevrolet has a lot of models, spanning a lot of years.  So let’s pick a model — the Chevrolet Bel Air.

Whoops, still too broad, so let’s focus on a specific year — the 1957 Chevy Bel Air.  Now we’re getting warmer.  And if we really want to niche it down more, we’d talk about just the engine parts for the 1957 Chevy Bel Air.  It’s a topic that doesn’t have a huge search, but on the other hand, the traffic you do get is laser-targeted.

Traffic for an Online Niche

You may be saying to yourself, “Yeah, the traffic is really targeted, but there’s so little!”  Let’s think about that a second.

An online niche is a funny thing.  You start getting small amounts of traffic for your keywords (engine parts for the 1957 Chevy Bel Air), and you build the site up.  One day you notice a traffic increase and you see you’re getting traffic for the keywords “1957 Chevy Bel Air”.  Then maybe “Bel Air”.  See where I’m going?

Once you build the strength of your small niche, you start getting searches for the bigger keywords.

What is a Niche – Summary

Hopefully I’ve answered your question of what is a niche with these examples.  Niche marketing can be extremely profitable, depending on the subject and the opportunities to monetize it.  (Check out the post on finding a market niche to start.)

Until then — start thinking about your own niche!