Targeting a Market – Go Broad or Laser Target a Niche

You hear the term niche marketing all the time. Many internet marketing training resources recommend going after targeted niches when deciding what you’re promoting. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work particularly well in affiliate marketing, at least not if you want to be able to grow past a certain point. In this article, we’re going to look at some of the things you need to keep in mind when choosing a market.

First, let’s define exactly what a market and a niche is. A niche is a more specific subtopic within a broad overall market, such as anti-aging skin care vs skin care.

Because niches naturally have less competition than the broad markets, a lot of people recommend going after them. While this is true some of the time, other times, doing it this way can result in less than anticipated results leading to no opportunity for growth.

Being able to make multiple related offers to your audience is a critical piece of being successful with affiliate marketing.

If the niche you’re targeting is too highly focused, there may not be enough related, but different offers to interest them.

When you target a broad market, on the other hand, there will be all kinds of offers that are related but fairly unique.

For example, let’s say you were going to target the “lose weight” market. There are all kinds of things you could promote:

- How to lose inches off your waistline
- Healthy recipes
- Exercise programs
- Workout wear
- Exercise machines

Some of these things may be only loosely connected to one another, but someone interested in losing weight would probably be interested in several of them.

Unless you’re planning on building many “mini-sites” on each sub-niche of the main overall niche that you have choosen, then it is a better idea to go more broad on your keyword or keyword phrases.

If you’re worried about the amount of competition you’ll face when you target broad markets like this, here’s one way to work around it.

Start by targeting a more specific niche within the market, but set things up from the start so you can grow with time. Choose a domain name that would work for the broader market and start by focusing on a specific sub-topic. Over time, you can expand your website into other parts of the overall market, as your traffic grows and the site gets some traction.

And if you’re collecting subscribers for an email list (definitely a good idea) you can send them various related information right from the outset to condition them to expect it.