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A niche market can be defined as a market within a larger market segment whose needs can be very specific. Typically, a niche market is too small for the big players to be interested in so the competition will be manageable for the less established players. Niche marketing is simply marketing that is targeted at a niche market.

There are many ways you can go about running a niche marketing campaign. But online, where the target is usually keywords with low competition in the search engines, you would probably take the following steps:

* Identify keywords that has the most potential in terms of either Adsense revenue or product sales or both.

* Build a blog or website around those keywords.

* Optimize your blog posts, or website pages, for your targeted keywords.

* Get inbound links to your site or blog by submitting articles to the article directories. In addition, you can also network with other webmasters and get links between your sites or blogs.

* Just continue building backlinks using the previous techniques until your website or blog is ranked in the position that you want in Google.

There are many variations of the above steps as they will depend on your strengths, your long term goals and the topic of the website or blog in question. What is listed above are the normal steps carried out.

Expected Cost

In my opinion, you must pay for your domain name and web hosting. They will cost you less than $11 per month. The advantages of paying for those far weighs the small cost incurred.

You might also want to consider some other services which can enhance your productivity and, in the longer term, give you a better return on the time and effort that you invested:

* Paid writers for your articles, websites and blogs. You can look for them at job sites like eLance.

* Submitting your articles to all the various article directories, websites and blogs is time-consuming and probably one of the most boring activities known to man. If you can afford it, you really must get a service that automates the submission.

* Getting other webmasters to exchange links with you would also take up a large portion of your time. There are some services that brings together webmasters interested in link exchanges, and some would even monitor the backlinks resulting from link exchanges for you.

Skills Required

A relatively good command of English would definitely be recommended, especially if you intend to write the content and articles yourself. You don’t have to be a writer, but you must at least be able to write grammatically correct sentences and be disciplined enough to spell check your work.

There is a lot of computer and web related work to do. On the computer, you might find yourself touching up some graphics, or installing a software application, or even doing some html. On the web, you would probably need to update your name servers and configure your hosting account. You don’t need to be an expert to do all these, but some level of computer literacy would be needed.

Niche marketing is not a job but a business. And in any business, a spirit of entrepreneurship would be needed. While I have broken down the marketing process into a few simple steps, the details of how to implement each step varies for different people, different websites, different keywords, etc. Each niche also presents unique challenges that you, as the entrepreneur, must meet.