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Forget about a Niche Store: What is a NICHE?

I had told several of our readers and members that I would be making some posts about finding your niches and targeting those niches with keywords. The more I tried to put these thoughts to paper the more I realized that if you didn’t actually understand what a niche was, just forget about a niche store for a minute, then the process would not make any sense.

You see to discover and target a niche requires a fair amount of research and ingenuity that is just not apparent for most of the niche stores that I see users building. The reality is that most users are not building niche stores at all but online malls. The idea of using multiple categories to build top level stores or cover several unrelated areas is quite popular, but is not a niche. As a matter of fact, if you did not have to build every page of your store manually, one at a time, you really do not have a niche store at all.

Wh… Wha…What!! What are you talking about?! You’re Crazy!! Screams the computer as readers everywhere, trying to cling desperately to that last tiny kilobyte of hope, realize their virtual world is crashing in around them….

It mat not make sense to you yet but keep reading and let me explain. Build a Niche Store does incorporate many great features for automatically building a complete online store around any category or categories you choose. Note that I said a complete online store not a complete niche store. The truth here is that these features are in place to help new users build mildly profitable stores during the learning process. As you become more advanced in creating, customizing and marketing your stores the less and less you should be relying on these features. I’m sorry to be the one tell you this, but there is a not a single real niche store built by just entering a category number.

Lets take a look at the word niche and its definition first to more accurately make this point:

A niche is a focused, targetable portion (subset) of a market sector*

So what does that mean? Well simply put, in relation to our business, it means a specific product (focused, targetable portion) in a category (market sector). So if you are still building stores using category numbers without filtering those results with search queries, then you are not targeting a niche because a niche is a product inside that category. Make sense?

Does that mean that all your stores are worthless or need rebuilt. No. As I mentioned above, you can create mildly profitable stores, even in some cases very profitable stores, using category numbers. As always there are many other factors that can affect this such as quality content and very targeted marketing. Leaving those stores as they are and continuing to improve on them will still continue to increase their value and worth. As you build new stores though you’ll want to draw on your own previous experiences and the new skills you’ve developed to delve deeper into creating real niche stores.

Are you saying a niche store is only one page with one product? Not exactly. Not building a store based on a complete category does not necessarily mean that you’ll only have one page displaying the same types of products. For instance, let’s say you were originally going to build a store promoting new HDD Camcorders. Instead of building that store just off the HDD Camcorder Category you could target a specific type of camcorder such as JVC by building your store and entering that as a search query. Now of course that will only produce one store page. To expand your store you can now create new pages for each type of JVC HDD Camcorder there is. You now have multiple products and pages but still targeted to one niche. Of course that is a very general example but the same would apply if your product came in different colors, different sizes or other varying factors you could expand on. Additionally if your product also had accessories those could be targeted as well without ‘diluting’ the focus away from the targeted niche.

I still don’t understand. What is the benefit of only targeting a specific product or niche? Won’t I make more money by having hundreds of products? At the risk of sounding rude, but to be perfectly honest, 99% of the people that read this will not succeed if they do not utilize niche targeting. The reason for this is competition. Being new to internet marketing you have no experience, no authority, no reputation and no audience. The only way to gain these things is by focusing on a noncompetitive market that still has a demand for the product; or in other words, an undiscovered niche.

How can I be so confident that 99% of the readers can’t succeed without this information? Because this is not a secret but a sound internet practice that is unfortunately misunderstood by most new users. If you have read this far than more than likely you did not understand the actual concept of a niche in the first place. All successful internet marketers already know and utilize this concept and would have stopped reading some time ago.

The plain an simple fact is you are not going to build a top level store based on clothing, baby products, video games or etc using general, or none at all, keywords with a store page for every single eBay sub-category and make any real money. You’ll get some traffic, have some clicks and probably make enough cash to keep you excited for a while but that’s it. The competition on the internet for any category or sub-category on eBay is incredibly high because there are millions, let me say that again, millions of people, just like you, marketing these areas already. Your only edge is that most of them also do not know proper niche marketing.

To become successful in, lets say baby products, you’d do better to drop everything and find one product to market as your niche. When you become known in that area and are receiving good traffic and sales then add another related product and so on. Eventually, years from now, you could have a substantial complete baby product store generating tons of cash and traffic from building it step by step like that. You are not going to see those kinds of results from putting up a complete baby product store on a new domain tomorrow. Truthfully, you’re even hurting your sites overall growth by diluting its focal point, making it harder, if not impossible, for the search engines to determine what you’re an authority of.

Now this is not absolute. There are many ways to build and profit from Build a Niche Store and I am not telling you that this is the only way. The point of this article is to help you understand what a niche truly is and the difference between that and your current stores. This will help you better understand the concept being outlined in other or related articles that start talking about niches

Learning is the ultimate key to success. Start with top level category stores to learn using the software and practice writing content and marketing. Then start building very targeted stores to learn keyword and niche marketing strategies. These are only the first steps in your journey. Somewhere in between the two you’ll discover your own preferences and combinations of techniques that work best for you. After all, if there was only one way to do it, it wouldn’t be a niche would it?

If you need more help with researching your niche you should checkout WordTracker Keywords.

*The definition of the word “niche” was quoted from Wikipedia November 11, 2007.