Now sure, you may have read that title and rolled your eyes. Yes, I will admit that it was a pretty cheesy attempt at being clever (at least I tried!).
The fact remains, that targeting the right type of Niche is incredible important for a Niche Store Builder.
Let’s take a look at some examples and try to learn from them…
How would you define the word "Niche"?
Here are a couple definitions I found on the web from various sources:
Niche Marketing: Concentration on a small market segment with the objective of achieving dominance of that segment.
Niche Marketing: The direction of sales efforts to a narrow target market.
I think that for our purposes, these two definitions hit the nail right on the head!
Now that we have specifically defined what the "Niche" in "Niche Stores" means, how do we use this knowledge to our advantage?
We out think our competition!
This is much easier said than done, but it is vital that in order for our Niche Stores to be a success, we must ensure that we do the proper research and legwork before launching them to give them the best opportunity to do well.
Let’s use our Nation’s current gas price crisis as an example of how we can out think our competition in Niche Store Marketing. Let’s say we want to create a "Hybrid Car" type Niche Store, since sales of Hybrid Cars are brisk due to gas prices.
It would be very easy for us to obtain a domain name, upload BANS to our our server, title the page "Hybrid Cars for Sale" and walk away. Our little Niche Store would most likely take ages to be indexed by Google (if it got indexed at all since it has no unique content). Assuming it did get indexed, it would be sitting on the thousandth page of the results.
Why? Because we did not out think our competitors. We did not do much thinking at all in fact!
Where did we go wrong?
By targeting a very broad key term such as "Hybrid Cars", we made our job as Niche Store Builders a million times more difficult. It will be near impossible for us to ever surpass the high ranking sites for this key term. Major car manufacturers and large corporate businesses with millions of dollars behind their web interfaces will rank for these terms, leaving little room for our little "Hybrid Cars" Niche Store.
So what do we do?
Instead of targeting a highly competitive key term, instead target several long tail keywords. What is a long tail keyword you ask? (the following are un-researched examples.)
Hybrid Cars <— Highly competitive, broad keywords. Bad, bad, bad!
Used Hybrid Cars for Sale in Wisconsin <— Less competitive, Long tail keywords. Good!
Used Black Hybrid 4 Door Sedan <— Another example of Long tail keywords. Good!
Start thinking like an ordinary web surfer!
As you can see from our example, if you begin to think of the kinds of things an ordinary web user would type into a search engine, you will be able to come up with great long tail keywords that you can target with your Niche Stores. I can guarantee you that your store will get much more traffic and produce better sales by avoiding broad keywords, and going straight for the good stuff!
Have you had any success with Niche Stores that target a broad keyword? Do you focus solely on Long tail keywords for your stores? I would love to hear your thoughts!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Are you suggesting that the entire store should focus on as narrow a topic as “Used Cars for Sale in Wisconsin”? Or, it that just one content page of your store?
Thanks
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Thanks for your question!
You can look at it one of two ways:
1) You focus an entire store on a good, well researched, longtail keyword (like the “Used Cars for Sale in Wisconsin”) and with some proper SEO and linkbuilding, you can hopefully dominate that keyword, and get the majority of the organic Google traffic for that search phrase (which then will hopefully buy off your site)
OR
2) You can focus a store around a broad category (such as “Used Cars” or what have you), and *within* that store, build several pages for more targeted longtail key terms. This method requires the site to be much more in depth and complex. You will most likely need to create quite a few store pages, and SEO the entire site properly, or else you will get buried in Google since you targeted a “Broad key term” for your main page.
There are successful Niche Stores that target a broad category, and then skillfully and wisely target many “sub-niches” within the “broad niche”. It can most certainly be done. But be aware heading into it that you are in for a more difficult journey!
Creating web sites targeting a very specific single (or 2-3) long tail key phrases is much simpler, and beginner friendly.
That being said, neither of these methods are a sure thing, proper research, good site design, quality content, and a little bit of luck are all needed to get the dollars flowing in!
Hope this helps!
I’ve read through about half of your blog now. I’ll finish it later. Very interesting information.