What’s a Niche Anyway?
The Paniche website is dedicated to niche marketing, but what’s a niche anyway?
A niche is really just a group of people with like interests. A group of people with a similar hobby can be considered a niche, for example. People who like fishing, or model train enthusiasts; people who enjoy rock climbing; people with an interest in cars or computers; people who love cooking or eating or needlework or crocheting — can all be be considered a niche. You’d also consider people with a similar goal, like dieting and getting fit and healthy, or people with a similar problem, like diabetes.
Because we’d like to make money from our online marketing efforts, for our purposes the people in our chosen niche should also be willing and able to spend money.
So a niche and a market are the same thing to us. A large market can be broken down into niches and micro-niches. Consider people interested in fishing. A huge number of people are interested in fishing. But ‘fishing’ can be divided up into smaller groups, such as people interested in saltwater fishing and freshwater fishing. Or people who enjoy marlin fishing, or perhaps fly fishing — and so on. People who go fishing need equipment. They need rods and reels, sinkers and hooks. They may need special clothing or boats. Now if we wanted to make some money in the fishing niche, setting up a website on fishing generally and trying to get that website ranked on the first page of Google would be really difficult. So many other websites exist already, the competition is too great. But we could investigate a small micro-niche within the broader ‘fishing’ market.
Searching Google for the keyword ‘fishing’ by itself returns some 185 million results, so no way would we be able to get on the first page of Google for the term fishing. If I search on the term fishing reels in Google, I get just under 1.5 million results, so that’s a lots less. What if I now search for Shimano fishing reels, something much more specific? I get just on a quarter of a million results. That means there are 250,000 pages with the with the words Shimano, fishing and reels somewhere on the same page.
If I put those three words in quotation marks, that is, I search for “Shimano fishing reels” , there are just under 30,000 results. Now that’s a lot better for our purposes. placing the words in inverted commas means that I’m searching for those three terms together in one place and in that particular order in the website. In other words, the website is very focused for the term I’m searching on. With 30,000 results, depending on how optimised the pages are, we have a chance, with a bit of clever marketing to appear on the first page of Google. So if we target specifically “Shimano fishing reels” then we’ve got a chance to break into that niche.
So to summarise: a niche is simply a group of people with similar interests. For our purposes however, we’re looking for a subgroup or micro-niche of people passionately interested in something and willing to spend money in their niche.
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