Micro Niche – What It Is And Why You Should Care

Posted by kristinewirth on January 7

There’s been a lot of talk lately about micro niches.  What they are, why they’re important, and why you, as someone who either works online or would like to, needs to use them.

One of the reasons for this surge in micro-niche sites is due to a product that came out not too long ago, helping you choose those micro-niche ideas called Micro-Niche Finder.

But before we get into all of the details of a micro niche, let’s first discuss what a niche is for those who might be unfamiliar with the term.

A niche is a sub-section of a larger broader market.

So for an example, let’s take video games.  A very broad and competitive market.

Within the video games market you have sub-sections that all relate to the broad market of “video games”.  For example, there are a wide array of video game consoles on the market that all have their own video games:

• Playstation 2
• Playstation 3
• Xbox 360
• Wii
• Nintendo DS
• PlayStation Portable
• PC Games
• Mac Games
• Online Games

These are sub-sections of the larger broader market of “video games”.  So we could say, very broadly, that any one of these would be considered a “niche” of the video game market.

I say “very broadly” because even though we’ve narrowed down the video games market to different kinds of video games, we’re still dealing with a very broad topic in and of itself.

So let’s take this even further.

Let’s take the XBox 360 and it’s video games.

There are a variety of video games available for the Xbox that all fall into different categories.

• Fighting
• Music
• Racing
• Role-Playing

Just to name a few.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Role-playing games on the Xbox 360 would be considered a micro-niche of the video games market.

But let’s see if we can take this even further…

Within the role-playing niche of the Xbox 360, there are different brands of games, different ratings for the games, and different prices for the games.

Each one of these items:

• Brands
• Ratings
• Prices

Would be considered a micro-micro-niche.

For instance, if you created a website about XBox 360 games that were priced under $25; this would be a micro-micro-niche.

So here’s the path we’ve taken so far:

• Video Games – Broad Market
  • XBox 360- Niche Market
    • Role-playing- Micro-niche
      • Under $25 – micro-micro niche

We’ve started with a broad idea and kept narrowing that idea down until we had a small, tightly focused niche on our larger, broader topic.  Even down to a micro-micro niche level.

Here’s a great example of a micro-niche market for the XBox 360.  Someone did their due-diligence and actually created a product around the XBox 360 RROD (red ring of death) and how to fix it – which is a problem that occurs regularly with the XBox.

Just another great example of someone picking a micro-niche.

For the record here, I have not researched this niche and do not know if it will be profitable or not; therefore, if you choose to use this niche for whatever reason, be sure you do your due-diligence.  This was written for the sake of example only.

Ideally when you’re searching for a micro-niche, you first want to focus on a topic that you are genuinely interested in.  I say this because once you start working with a topic, you’ll be with it for a good amount of time until you can get that site ranking well within the search engines.

But what goes into a successful launch of a micro-niche website is beyond the scope of this blog post.

And to be completely honest here, not all micro-niches are going to pan out.

Some will fail miserably while others will exceed beyond your wildest expectations.

The only way to know for sure, is to test that micro-niche and to be patient.

That said, when you’re looking for micro-niches to market, there are a few things you should look for:

There should be a market for your micro-niche. While this sounds like it should be common-sense, oftentimes people take it for granted.  You might be a big fan of pictures of bacon but this doesn’t mean a lot of other people are OR that they’re going to spend money in that niche.

This also means that people should be advertising on your niche of choice.  If you head to Google and type in your idea, are there people advertising?  The more people there are that are advertising, the better, since this means that there are buyers in your micro-niche market.

Are there people searching on keywords related to your niche market? If you use a tool like Micro Niche Finder, Market Samurai or simply, the Google AdWords tool, are there searches being done on your niche topic of choice?

If so, how many?  If you see that only 100 people a month are searching on a keyword related to your idea, it obviously won’t bring you much traffic at all which also equates to hardly any $$ in your pocket.

In other words, it will hardly be worth the effort.

If on the other hand, you see that there are 100,000 searches being done a month on a keyword you’re considering then you can take a look at how competitive this keyword phrase is within Google.

Check Google for Competition. Now, when you check Google for your competition, you’ll want to do a search on your keyword phrase in quotes like this:

“pictures of bacon”

This will assure that Google only returns those websites that contain that phrase within them.

At this point, if there are a million websites that do in fact have this phrase contained within them, don’t despair!

This doesn’t really mean that you’re up against that many competitors.

Here’s what I mean by that:

Just because Google says there are 1 million web pages competing for your phrase, doesn’t mean that those are all “high-quality” websites.  As a matter of fact, it’s likely that many of these so-called “competitors” haven’t done their due-diligence in regards to proper on-page SEO, link building and more.

So, how do you find that out?

Well, there’s a few tools on the market that can help you.

1. Traffic Travis – A tool provided for free by super affiliate Mark Ling of Affilorama (there is a premium version as well but you don’t need the premium version for this example).  If you plug in your main keyword phrase into the SEO analysis tool, it will tell you within moments how much “real” competition you’re up against by providing you with an overall score.
   1. Watch a video on Traffic Travis as well as download it here.
      
2. Market Samurai – Currently $150 (at last check).  Here you can run the keyword through their SEO Competition tool and see what it tells you.  Market Samurai is a little different because it’s a color coded results page – the more red, the more difficult it is to break into that niche.  So it does involve some work and isn’t as clear cut as Traffic Travis.
3. Micro Niche Finder – This tool let’s you also see at a glance how strong your competition is by using something called “SOC” which stands for “strength of competition”.  This also uses a color coded system which makes it easy to see which keyword phrase is worth using.
   1. There’s a free video on Micro Niche Finder Here.

The bottom line is, it’s actually pretty easy to find a niche market once you know what market you want to get into.  And all of the tools mentioned above will help you locate a micro-niche that may be well worth the effort.

Just know that it takes time to discover whether or not that market will be profitable to you.  Whatever you do, don’t give up until you’ve tested thoroughly.

Too often people get discouraged because they aren’t seeing results as quickly as they’d like to.  But giving up too soon could mean that you’re getting rid of a diamond in the rough.

Resources:

• Micro Niche Finder
• Traffic Travis
• Market Samurai
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Comments

One Response to “Micro Niche – What It Is And Why You Should Care”

1. kids internet games says:

   March 2 at 4:44 am

   As i am a management student i just knew about the niche market but after going through this article now i know about micro-niche market.It is very important to define you niche market but now it is more important to define micro-niche market.the example of video games is very good i understood it very well well thank you.
   kids internet games