Niche marketing is a concept that many marketeres do not quite understand. They think that by simply taking a sub-genre of a particular niche will bring them success quickly and easily.

I am here to tell you that this couldn’t be farther from the truth, as niche marketing is one of the hardest methods to master when it comes to making money online.

As I outline in my three steps to dominating the competitoin with niche marketing strategies take note of techniques that you are currently not employing when it comes to marketing your website and its products or services.

Finding Niches

Not only do you want to find a profitable niche, but you want to find one that isn’t too competitive.

This step is very crucuial to your success because if you fail to properly find an appropriate niche you are going to struggle right out of the gate, and most likely give up before you actually see any success.

To begin finding profitable niches, you will first want to find one that has a sizeable audience on the internet.

You can guage this by using popular keyword tools like Market Samurai or Google’s External Search Tool. You will want to look for niche keywords that have moderate search volume, as anything with less than 1000 searches per month is not going to drive much organic search traffic once you begin ranking.

Once you have found the perfect keyword from a search volume perspective you will then want to start deciding on how you are going to monetize.

It is important to remember that while Google Adsense is easy it may not pay as much as promoting affiliate products would. Because of this you should belong to as many affiliate networks as you can.

This will enable you to search a wide vareity of advertisers for offers and products that fit in with your newly found niche.

Once you have found related products/offers or decided that you would rather monetize with Google Adsense you will need to do some competition analysis to see if you will be able to successfully dominate the niche.

Competition Analysis

Most consider this step very easy, and to make your analysis even easier I would recommend you download the SEOquake plug-in for your favorite browser.

This program alone will cut down on the amount of time you spend doing your analysis. when you do a Google search for your keyword the first thing you want to take note of is the domains that are on page 1.

If you see a bunch of web 2.0 propertites like hubpages, ehow, or squidoo you will want to double check their backlinks.

This is because these article sites have high authority from Google and if the page ranking also has additional backlinks pointed to it then you will have a very hard time breaking the wall there.

However, if you run your search and your SEOquake toolbar reports that most of the pages ranking are under PR4 and don’t have very many links then you might be onto a winner.

The next important step to determining compeition is trying to analyze how many of those on page one are actively optimizing for the keyword. You can do this by looking at the title of all the pages.

If you see bolded text all the way down the screen you can definitely surmise that there are other webmasters optimizing for your keyword. This means it might be a fight for your eventual website to rank on the front page. Not impossible, but will definitely be a fight.

Once you have found a keyword that is suitable start building your website and then continue on with my niche marketing strategies.

Targeted Traffic

If you selected a profitable and less competitive keyword to start optimizing for you will find that many times more than not you will be ranking within reach of page 1 within one or two months.

Often times, if you are going after micro niches then you could see page 1 ranking within 2 to 3 weeks.

But how do you drive traffic to your website that will convert before you start getting organic traffic? Bt finding related message boards.

I have discussed at length the succecss you can see with forum marketing, and this is really no different.

The beauty of using these techniques with niche marketing is that it can be far more benefical than anything else.

This is because you will be seeking out niche-related message boards and then joining the community. Within two to three weeks time you will be able to include your website in your sig file, which will send more targeted traffic than you can imagine.

On top of that, by the time you start building your reputation on the various niche-related message boards you will find that your site will start ranking in the search engines.

This means you will be getting targeted traffic from two ends. One from the related message boards, sending users already interested in your site (hence giving you a better opportunity for sales/clicks) and you will be getting organic traffic by people who are looking for answers or information.

Combining both forum marketing, social marketing and organic traffic together can generate a massive amount of interest in your niche, which just means more opportunity to increase sales and ROI.

By following these three niche marketing strategies you will find yourself on a road to success, simply put, because these methods work and have worked for a long time.

I like to discuss tried and true methods here, and it really doesn’t get any better than this. It also doesn’t matter if you are new to internet marketing or consider yourself a veteran, as there are literally thousands, maybe millions of niches out there waiting for a webmaster to find them.

Remember, the fastest guy doesn’t always win the race, which translates into creating multiple niche websites to do split testing.

Once you a method that works for you on more than one occassion is when you start ramping up production on creating more and more. Only then will you be able to succeed on a large scale with niche marketing.