Niche marketing is marketing that is focused specifically on the needs of a very targeted group of users. Such a market is typically not large, so that the competition is manageable for the less established players.

In the online world, niche marketing is primarily concerned with niches in which the search engine competition is low. Normally, you will carry out the following steps:

* Do your keyword research to identify keywords that has the most potential and the least competition. Keywords are words or phrases that a surfer uses to search for their area of interest.

* 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.

* Keep building inbound links until your website ranks at the position you want in Google for your targeted keywords.

I have outlined the basic steps above but you will probably have to mix and match as necessary. Niche marketing is definitely not an exact science and you have to adjust accordingly.

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.

There are other services you might want to consider spending money on as they will increase your productivity, and in the long run, give you a better return on the time you spent:

* You can choose to write all the content yourself but it is time consuming. If you have the budget, you can consider getting a writer or writers for at least some of your content.

* Submitting your article to the various websites, blogs and article directories will take up a lot of your time as there are hundreds, if not thousands, of them out there. Article submission software, especially those that avoids sending out duplicate content, is well worth the investment.

* Exchanging links with other webmasters can become a breeze if you subscribe to services that brings together webmasters interested in link exchange. Some of the paid services comes with scripts that you install on your website so that the whole link exchange process is quite automated.

Skills Needed

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.