Find Your Niche with Long Tail Keywords and Make Money Online

Chris Anderson, executive editor of Wired magazine, coined the phrase "The Long Tail" in 2004 to describe the key principle behind niche marketing strategies that companies like Amazon.com used to build sales on the Internet.

While Amazon leads the way when it comes to selling books to a wide range of niches, anybody can build a successful business focusing on just one or two niche markets on the Internet. You don't need to go for the whole tail. You can find a very comfortable position for yourself by choosing just one section, or sub-section, of the tail and "dominating your niche" by focusing all your marketing effort on it.

By focusing on a single niche you will also quickly build up a reputation for yourself as an expert in your chosen field.

So, what must you do to find a niche and dominate it?

First of all, find something you know a lot about, something that interests you and that you would enjoy talking to others about.

Once you have found an area of interest it is time to drill down to specifics. Being specific is one of the keys to niche marketing. The long tail is long precisely because it extends over a huge range of specific interests. Your aim should be to find a specific niche that is small enough for you to dominate, but large enough for you to establish yourself as an expert and make a good living in.

Let's say you are interested in games. "Games" is a huge category so "board games" is an improvement but you are still faced with a huge amount of choice, so narrow it down further to something more specific such as "German board games".

This would serve as your primary niche and if possible should be incorporated into the name of your website, i.e., German-Board-Games.com or germanboardgames.com.

You now have the exciting choice of deciding whether to buy and sell physical games, or whether to make your own product such as an ebook about the German gaming scene, or a series of ebooks each dealing with a particular German board game.

Trading in physical products from your niche site is a good thing to do if you have time to deal with purchasing, packing and shipping as well as customer enquiries. Selling physical products to a niche also opens up sites like eBay for your business.

However, there are only so many units of product that a single person can turn around, so if you go down this route you will either have to stay small or begin hiring staff at a certain stage as your business develops.

Making your own information product will require a lot of research and writing for no immediate return. However, once you have your information product up on your site you can sell it again and again without having to worry about handling stock. This gives your business more scope to expand without your having to employ any more staff.

In addition to these two options, you may want to find some niche-relevant affiliate programs to promote in order to generate extra revenue. If you sell an ebook, having a related affiliate product to sell on the back end is an excellent profit-boosting strategy.

Your aim is now to make your site the top destination for people looking for online information and about "German board games" or whatever your chosen niche happens to be. As a niche marketer you don't have to compete with the marketing giants and sell to the whole world. All you want is to attract a few hundred people to your site each week and work on turning those visitors into customers and those customers into fans.

By setting up a website that pitches to a well defined niche somewhere on Chris Anderson's Long Tail you stand a much better chance of succeeding online and dominating your chosen market.