Once upon a time, you built a business and then found the way to market to your product by finding the right niche, the right marketing angle. This will still work, and if you have a particular product or service to market, you may find interest in such articles at The Business Owner's Toolkit or E-Commerce: Niche Marketing on the Web. However, if you're like most new webmasters, you have a passion about some topic and you put up a website and later think about how you could make money off of this fun stuff called webmastering.

That's where a different angle on niche marketing comes in. Consider this idea: There are thousands, if not millions, of surfers on the internet at this moment. A good fraction of those are searching this very moment for something that interests them. A fraction of that fraction are searching for a particular item they wish to purchase. That small fraction of total surfers could still be a large number of actual eyeballs.

Let's say that small fraction is searching for pink French widgets. These folks are not interested in blue Italian widgets, nor in beige American spotted widgets. They want authentic pink French widgets only! They are a niche market!

Now how do you take advantage of niche marketing just because a bunch of folks are searching for pink French widgets? Realize you must still do classic marketing homework such as:

• Identify the niche market.
• Reach your niche market.
• Present your niche market with exactly what it is they want.

Identify the niche market
In the world of internet marketing, one of the methods of identifying a niche is by keyword phrase. A keyword phrase is a series of words which describe the niche product. For instance "pink French widgets" in our example. How do you know where these niches are hiding? Consider that the single most popular activity on the internet is searching on the search engines. The keyword phrases used to search are the descriptions of what folks are seeking! Yup, if folks are searching for pink French widgets, they are more than likely using a search engine to search and find.

Reach your niche market.
Okay, if everyone is using the search engines, then let's start with discussing getting a page together that everyone searching for pink French widgets will find. Obviously, as mentioned in that E-Commerce niche marketing article, you can also reach your audience through e-mail and news groups and discussion boards. However, that is still a job of you finding them. How about if they find you? Right. They are so proud of finding exactly what they wanted that they whip out that credit card and click on through to purchase it!

Reaching your niche market means finding out exactly what keyword phrase is used for searching for the niche product. It could be that most folks type in French pink widgets, or maybe most people search for Widgets French Pink. How can you know the mysteries of the internet surfer without having to optimize 100 different pages for the same product?

The answer to that is Wordtracker. Wordtracker will give you data on whether more searches are done for French pink widgets or pink French widgets. Even better, it will help you identify whether one of those keyword phrases has less competition, giving you an easy niche to fill. And even more, it will help you brainstorm on other keyword phrases related to pink French widgets that surfers are seeking. The free trial only gives you data for Alta Vista, and it does not compare to the power of the full paid version. Luckily you can even buy one day of service and optimize all day long! More than 70% of successful affiliate marketers use Wordtracker for help in identifying a niche market.

You can also identify these niches by yourself, given more time and effort ("time ain't money if all you got is time"). The best description we've seen on how to do this yourself is capsulated by internet marketing genius Ken Evoy in his Affiliate Masters e-mail course. We also offer this great e-mail course as a free e-book download from our site. For the Affiliate Master e-book, click here.

Present your niche market with exactly what they want.
But what if you don't make or own or know where to get pink French widgets? That's where affiliate marketing comes in. Out there on the vast internet is an e-commerce site with great pink French widgets, but noone knows how to find them on their gorgeous graphic intense site that just doesn't show up well in the search engines. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get a page to rank well in the search engines for this niche product. If you do not sell it yourself, you can find a merchant who does and earn commissions on every sale.

And just where can you learn search engine optimization (SEO)? Well, you can do a search on our favorite search engine, http://www.google.com, or you can join in the lively and helpful discussions at http://www.aBestWeb.com for starters. There is a lot to know about search engine optimization, but with a little work, you can get your niche product in front of those searching for it and earn money to support your new webmaster habit.

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• SSI tutorial -- Use server side includes to make site maintenance a breeze.
• The Secrets Behind Affiliate Marketing -- Is affiliate marketing as simple as they say?
• The Truth about Building a Business on the 'Net -- Is it instant riches or is it hard work? Hear it from a pro.
• Using Keywords Effectively