subject: Your Internet Niche [print this page] I think without a doubt that choosing the right niche is the most important step an Internet marketer can take. If you get this step wrong, nothing else you do will matter. You can have the best-looking web site, you can understand search engine optimization very well, you can do a very good job in all of the areas of Internet marketing; but if you choose the wrong niche, then you are sunk before you start.
You could create a stylish web site, and I see it all the time where people spend hours creating a web site and getting it to look great, and spend an ample amount of time writing content. They know all about search engine optimization. They find key words and they optimize for the key words. Everything is done correctly. They publish to the web, and one of the hardest things I have to do when they ask me why they don't get traffic, is to tell them that they chose the wrong niche.
For one reason or another, the niche was not correct. If you get the wrong niche, like choose too large of a niche for example, then the competition is so great that it's all but impossible to get any traffic to the web site. Of course, traffic is one of the key principles to Internet marketing. Low traffic means there will be few if any sales. If you choose a niche that is too small of a market, you may be able to attract traffic and you may be able to rank well in the search engine, but the market is incredibly small that it wouldn't yield much of an income.
Before you do anything for your web site or your web business, prior to spending one minute writing content or building a web site, make sure that you understand how to do niche research. That's not about going out and looking at the keyword tools, whether you look at the three keyword tools or the purchased key word tool, you simply cannot rely on those alone.
Too many marketers, and myself included, have made that mistake of using the keyword tools to direct us on the web site that we create and the keywords that we use to optimize the content with. That is a huge mistake.
The keyword tools are great for brainstorming, but you must go the extra mile and do the real keyword research methods to determine which keywords are valid for your niche. Doing the research will also tell you if the niche poses great possibility or the niche is a bad idea, and we want to know that before we go into building the web site. There are no guarantees, of course, but we can sure make a very educated guess as to our chances of success.
If you just pick a niche out of the blue and use the free keyword tool to validate your idea, it's a lot like playing darts in the dark. You simply cannot base your web site or your business on the free keyword tools. You must perform extra steps to validate that the niche you selected is correct and viable.
