Contributed post
This article talks about the power of finding a niche within business, and in particular blogging, as this one principle can help you stand out from an otherwise generic crowd and gain audience share within an ever competitive online space; meaning you’ll be in a much better position to start to make money from your blogging endeavours.
What is a niche?
A niche is a focused subset of a particular market group. If you were to think about pet food, for example, you could niche that down to cat food and dog food – but this is still a very broad market. If, however, you were to look at gourmet dog food this could be considered a niche market.
Why having a niche is important
In the case of having a blog on a broad topic such as budget travel, you are up against competitors with massive marketing budgets that spend thousands on digital advertising and are in the position to instruct experts such as an organic seo agency or affiliate marketing consultants to manage their campaigns.
Often, the broad markets are very crowded and competitive with a few dominant leaders with high domain authority that Google naturally pulls up the search rankings. If you were to think of this from a marketing spend perspective, you are wanting to get the greatest return on investment possible, and in spending money on digital marketing (e.g. Google Adwords) the cost per click for an advert relating to “budget travel” is going to be much higher than “budget solo female travel” because the search term is less competitive.
It also means that the person clicking on that particular advert is likely to be a more relevant customer looking for your particular solution. Realistically, you don’t want thousands of people clicking on your adverts – you only want qualified prospects – and the more niche focused your marketing is, the better the conversion and the higher return on investment.
Why you won’t lose customers
It can feel counterintuitive to limit your market, by focusing on one specific group, particularly if you’re offering something that has broad market appeal (e.g. hairdressing).
However, think of specialists within the medical profession. You have general doctors then you have specialist consultants that focus on a particular niche and charge way much more for their time. In focusing on a particular niche (e.g. a certain type of cancer) they create massive pull toward their offering to the people that are specifically seeking out a solution to the problem they face.
In doing so, you position yourself as the go-to-expert and align so strongly with that particular audience they are magnetically attracted to your ‘specialist area’ of expertise. Remember, people have problems and they seek solutions – if you can position your service as offering a more relevant solution than a more broad spectrum competitor, they will choose you.
In marketing, relevancy is everything and one of the best ways to make yourself stand out as a relevant service provider, or a relevant content platform, is to use niche marketing to your advantage.
Tailor your marketing to each target segment
If you have a broad blog with several audiences it is wise to segment by category, but to keep things related within one particular genre – as an example, a personal development blog could have a section on psychology, fitness, and wealth – all of which are congruent with the brand, yet are segmented to people with different interests and reasons for coming to your blog.