Niche marketing has always been a key any success in marketing but lately it has become quite a prominent force in the online marketing world. Many books, manuals, courses, and web sites have been developed that focus on niche marketing. It is easy to find solid resources on the Internet that can teach you how to make money with niche marketing.

Niche marketing online is a distinct segment of Internet marketing and is the quickest way to get maximum exposure if you know how to leverage the search engines to draw attention to your niche web site.

There's many things to learn to be successful and profit from niche marketing and your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) will dictate exactly how to plan your attack to successfully market to customers in your niche.

If you plan to use niche marketing to draw visitors to your web site, here's a few tactics that you can use to make money:

Niche Marketing Tactic #1, "Research"

Fully utilize all of the research mechanisms that you can find in order to make sure that you truly understand your niche and all of its nuances.

This requires understanding what tools are best to use so you can understand what your target niche market does day to day, where they spend their time online, and what makes them tick from a personal and business perspective.

Niche Market Research (http://www.nichemarketresearch.com)offers free reports and articles to help you make the most of your research time.

Niche Marketing Tactic #2, "Define your paying niche"

Clearly define who will make up your niche market and make sure that the people in that niche market are willing to pay for the solution that you provide to their problems.

A niche is a clear subset of a larger category.

An example of what a niche market is not: "People who want to learn how to shoot better scores in golf."

In this example, there are far too many people within the main category (golf) to make this a true niche. Virtually everyone who plays golf will want to play better and shoot better scores so this wouldn't qualify as a niche, much less a category worth pursuing.

An example of a niche market: "Women who play golf who want to learn how to drive the ball longer and straighter."

This would be a niche because it clearly defines and segments who you'll cater to and why they would need your service.

After clearly defining your niche market, you should make sure that they are willing to pay for your services. The easiest way to determine this in the online world (other than using common sense) is to find web sites that may be close to, or even in your niche, and see if those web sites charge a fee for their services.

In addition, you should look to see if there is a reasonable level of competition between those web sites.

If you see more than a few sites listed on a SERP (Search Engine Result Page) that cater to female golfers for a fee, chances are the people who are your target customer will pay for your services for

Niche Marketing Strategy #3, "Choosing keywords and domain names"

Research and choose your keywords carefully so you can acquire the best domain name for your site. Niche marketing most often includes maximizing the way search engines work to make sure that your web site gets listed n the first page of the SERP's from your chosen keywords. Your domain name contributes to getting those first page results.

Go to Digitalpoint's keyword suggestion tool and type in keywords that you feel people would use to find the product or service that you offer within your niche. Look at the number of searches performed per day for those keywords and review the other keywords listed.

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/

Type the keyword phrase that you think best suits your USP's target customer into Google and assess whether or not you can reasonably compete with the sites that are listed on page 1 of the SERPs.

Can you get a page 1 ranking knowing that you'll have to compete with the sites already listed?

Repeat the process until you have decided what your main keywords will be for your product or service within your niche.

Those keywords should be in your domain name and preferably, they should be your entire domain name.

Example: if you've concluded that 'blue widgets' best suits your USP and you feel that you can compete for page 1 listings on the SERPs with the sites that come up on page 1 for the keyword 'blue widgets', then a good domain name for your niche marketing site would be 'bluewidgets.com'.

Niche Marketing Tactic #4, "Posting keyword rich articles or reports throughout the web"

Niche marketing doesn't differ from any other online search engine marketing, posting relevant content is the best way (bar none) to get the right type of traffic to your niche site.

Writing keyword rich articles or reports and posting them to high traffic web sites is a great way to make sure that you get maximum exposure within your niche market. People will use your keywords to search for information about the topic that they have interest in, and they will come across your web site on the search engines results.

Niche marketing caters to a distinct and select group of people who need what you have to offer. If you define your niche properly and make sure that your ability to solve their problem is something that they will pay for, you will have established a "money maker".

Utilize the search engines to make it easy for your niche market to find your service or product. Niche marketing is the easiest way to be successful on the Internet if you do the proper research.

Karl Augustine -Publisher, "Starting Smart!"

*Learn SEO - Top 10 listings

http://www.9mistakes-online.com/nichemarketing.htm