What Is a Niche Market?

‘What is a niche market?’ is a question that plagues most beginner bloggers.  Niche market research is one of the most important things you can do before starting your blog.

I think a lot of people start blogging because they want a way of making money online.  When I first started out, I thought that I needed to choose the largest market with the most popular products.

I thought this would give me the largest share of customers and the best chance of making sales.

I learned that there’s a lot of competition for the most popular products and services.  So much that I couldn’t compete and I didn’t make a cent.

It took me a while to figure out that what I actually needed to do was choose a small but profitable niche.

What is a Niche Market?

Wikipedia defines a niche as;

“A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing; therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact.”

Essentially a niche is a small section of a larger market.   You’re looking to target a specific section of a larger market where the needs for products and services aren’t being met by the businesses serving the majority of customers.

Markets and Niches

For example, let’s take a look at the large ‘Electronics’ market.  The ‘Electronics’ market has a number of niches such as, TV and Video, Home Theater, Cameras, MP3 Players, Car Electronics, Home Appliances and many more.

For each one of these niches, there are smaller niches within them.  For instance, within the ‘Home Appliances’ niche, there are Blenders, Coffee Machines, Portable Grills etc.

You can break these niches down even more into the different brands, their accessories, new and used etc.

The key is to keep drilling down further and further into these niches until you find a small but profitable micro-niche.  You have to do your niche market research to help you choose the best niche.

Niche Market Research

Keyword research is an essential part of niche market research.  In my next post, I’ll go into more detail on choosing keywords and finding niche markets.

For now though, I’ll leave you with Dr Anthony Fernando from Market Samurai and his video on ‘Understanding Keyword Research’.  This video is an excellent guide for helping you to understand keyword research and what is a niche market.