How to Target a Niche Audience

If you’re trying to sell something online it would make sense to target as many people as possible in the hope of making lots of sales, right?

Actually no – nothing could be further from the truth. Your best bet is to target a much smaller group of people with an offer which is specifically tailored to meet their needs.

Consider this. If you had a new golf club you wanted to sell, you would go and find someone who plays golf to see if they wanted to buy it. You wouldn’t try and sell it to just anyone, and exactly the same principle applies online.

The good news is that niche markets are smaller, easier to target and generally present much less in the way of competition. If you can target a niche audience in the right way you’ll have a much better chance of making some significant sales than if you try and reach out to anyone and everyone.

But in order to make those sales you need to make sure your site is found by the people who want to buy what you have to offer. To do this it’s very important that you have the right kind of content on your site.

Include plenty of useful information that will appeal to those people, and make sure it is rich in relevant keywords. So if your site sells rare golf clubs, you could write an article on the benefits of using rare golf clubs, making sure that term is used several times throughout the piece. By using longer key phrases you will stand a much better chance of being found when people search for information on your subject area in the search engines.

It’s also worth joining a couple of related forums and taking part in some discussions to gain some knowledge of what your niche market is like. You can often include a link to your website in your forum signature, although you should always check with each individual forum to make sure they do allow this. So long as you are a worthy forum member yourself this should bring you an extra stream of qualified traffic.

You might think that if you’re selling rare golf clubs you’re better off targeting everyone who plays golf, but this isn’t actually true. Not everyone will be interested in rare clubs, which is what makes this a niche interest. The more precise you can be with your targeting – via forums, keywords, advertising and so on – the better your visitors to sales ratio will be.

Web Profits specialises in search engine optimisation, online marketing & web design, helping businesses generate profits from the Internet. For a free report on 'The Secrets of Online Marketing for Offline Businesses' visit Search Engine Optimisation.