Niche Marketing Breakdown

Before jumping into your next ad campaign, or even starting a new web site or blog, take a step back and look at exactly who you are tying to target. We often come up with great ideas for new ad campaigns and site, then start getting excited with our ideas, without looking at the big picture and room for improvement. It’s not enough to target a niche, but it’s now more important than ever to focus on niches within niches.

An excellent example of a huge site in it’s own niche, is IGN.com, which is one of the largest video game sites on the internet. They don’t just cover computer games, they cover all games! Everything from XBox, Playstation, Wii, Computer Games and more. IGN has the massive exposure, staff and funding to take on this massive and competitive niche like many others can’t. Pushing out quality content and video on a daily basis isn’t a problem for them. With all of that said, do you think you would be able to compete with a player like IGN.com if you wanted to get into the video game space? Probably not.

You want to focus on video games, but how can you compete at the same time? Simple… break down your efforts and focus on a niche group. Instead of trying to create an ad campaign, web site or blog that focuses on all games, you need to be selective on your targets and ad copy. An excellent way to do this, would be to focus on one of the big three (Wii, PS3, XBox). To break down your efforts and increase your return on efforts, you can go a level deeper and select specific games which are only available on one of these system.

Using Google’s Keyword Tool, we can pull up quick reports on how many time the big three gaming systems are searched in a given month. Among the three systems, you have over 300 million searches every month. Even if you were to grab just one tenth of a percent (.001%) of this traffic, you would have 300,000 visitors to your blog… but the competition for these keywords is phenomenally high, as you can see from the “competition” bar below.

Break down each of the gaming systems to another level, such as the most popular games from each system. You can see we still have millions of monthly searches, and they vary heavily based on the game search. Competition is still extremely high, which usually means there is good money to be spent and made in this area… but the majority of these advertisers are probably big and well funded sites in the video game space.

One last time… let’s take one of the search results from above and break it down by itself. You are now given a selection of top keywords searched just on this one search term. Now you have a massive amount of search results and topics all on this one tight niche group. Had you created a blog on call of duty when it first came out, you would have reaped the benefits every time a new version of the game came out.

This breakdown is a perfect example of how you can take one niche and continually break it down til you have a super tight and high traffic topic. Instead of spreading you and your ad campaign or web site thin, why not focus on a single topic with a large following and search traffic? You will find that not only will you provide exactly what your customers and site readers are looking for, but they are also more likely to be in a buying / action mode, which increases overall revenue.

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17 Comments

  1. I really enjoyed your post and I am now interested in reading some more of your posts on your blog and see what you have to say. Do you mind if I tweet your blog post out to my followers on twitter? I think they would also enjoy the blog post. Thanks.

  3. It's hard to compete with successful active companies, that's why you need to draw your own line of work and focus on it. I would personally prefer to have my e-mail account on a dedicated e-mail company, rather then going to a successful company that not only offers e-mail, but also sells tomatoes and onions, if you get my drift.
    My recent post Taking the big HTML5 and CSS3 leap

  4. Very interesting breakdown illustration… This can be applied for blogs as well as e-commerce. It's much easier to position yourself in tighter niches.

    When starting your online empire, you don't have funds to go after the big players but you have passion, time and flexibility, use that in a clever way to pick a good entry point.

    1. Definitely. Don't have any money to get started? Spend $10 on a domain, $10 on hosting, build a small niche site, help rank it with article marketing and you are making a few bucks a month. An excellent way to get started without much overhead.

  5. Great illustration Zac. It's true that you don't want to go head to head with the big established sites within a niche. That is, unless you have a huge budget to seriously compete. Many people make the mistake of being too optimistic or too greedy and trying to cover too big a niche. Tightly focusing on one particular subniche has many advantages. For example, the search engines will see that consistent relevance throughout your site and will reward you with better rankings.

  7. You gave some great information in really trying to narrow down your search on finding a specific niche. If I were to find this information a year ago I know my affiliate site would have probably been a better success then it is today. I like how you used Google Keyword tool to really break down the gaming companies along with the games to really show how you can narrow down your search really good.

    1. Thanks. You can always launch a few niche gaming sites off your main game site. It can help with indexing and growth of the site by branching out web properties.

  9. Great recommendation on the "only show closely related results". Forgot to mention that one. It's also a good idea to check off "Show Competitor CPC Rates", so you can get an idea on ad spend as well.

  10. There will also be a never ending supply of video game reviews, tutorials, previews, buy/sell and customers in the video game niche. Lots of possibilities.

  11. These days you have to dig deeper to find keywords with good searches and less competition

  12. Twitted.

    Many affiliate marketers like playing videogames.

    Why not get in the niche they enjoy so much anyway? 🙂
    My recent post Breakdown of the online gaming niche market

  13. but how to promote the site after you chose your keywords, the competition is still high, even after all the breakdown
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