A niche market can be defined as a market within a larger market segment whose needs can be very targeted. Typically, a niche market is too small for the big boys to be interested in so the competition will be manageable for the less established players. Niche marketing is simply marketing that is targeted at a niche market.

In the online world, niche marketing is primarily concerned with niches in which the search engine competition is low. Normally, you will carry out the following steps:

* Research keywords that a surfer will use to find what they want. Look out for those particular keywords which has a good potential for profit and not a lot of competition in the search engine rankings.

* Build a website or blog for Adsense revenue or revenue from other ad networks. You can also aim to sell your own or affiliate products.

* Optimize the content in your blog posts or website pages for the search engines, keeping in mind the keywords targeted.

* Get inbound links to your site or blog by submitting articles to the article directories. In addition, you can also network with other webmasters and get links between your sites or blogs.

* Just continue building backlinks using the previous techniques until your blog or website is ranked in the position that you want in Google.

I have outlined the basic steps above but you will probably have to mix and match as necessary. Niche marketing is definitely not an exact science and you have to adjust accordingly.

Investment Needed

The only thing that I think you really must pay for is your web hosting and your domain name. A web hosting account that allows multiple domains goes for about $10 a month. A domain name costs about $10 a year, or less than $1 per month.

You might also want to consider some other services which can enhance your productivity and, in the longer term, give you a better return on the time and effort that you invested:

* Paid writers for your articles, websites and blogs. You can look for them at job sites like eLance.

* Submitting your articles to all the various article directories, websites and blogs is time-consuming and probably one of the most boring activities known to man. If you can afford it, you really must get a service that automates the submission.

* Exchanging links with other webmasters can become a breeze if you subscribe to services that brings together webmasters interested in link exchange. Some of the paid services comes with scripts that you install on your website so that the whole link exchange process is quite automated.

Skills Needed

You don’t have to be William Shakespeare, but you must have good grammar and be able to present your ideas in a clear and concise fashion. In addition, good spelling is also a prerequisite. Even if you are intending to outsource the writing, there will be times when you would want to do a simple rewrite to avoid being flagged for duplicate content.

There is a lot of computer and web related work to do. On the computer, you might find yourself touching up some graphics, or installing a software application, or even doing some html. On the web, you would probably need to update your name servers and configure your hosting account. You don’t need to be an expert to do all these, but some level of computer literacy would be needed.

Niche marketing cannot be seen as just a sales job but must be seen in the larger context of a business. And by its very definition, each business is unique. Although I have broken niche marketing into a few simple steps, you must look at those steps as an integrated whole, that is, as a business. As a niche marketer, you are not a salesman but a businessman.