In today’s post, I am going to be clearing up some confusion about two topics that new comers to internet marketing have difficulty grasping: the difference between a niche and a keyword phrase.  Heck, when I first started internet marketing, I didn’t get it, either.  I decided to talk about them together because they are kind of related when it comes to online marketing.

First, let’s talk about a niche.  A niche is a group of people who are looking for a solution to a problem (or who want to learn how to do something) and are willing to pay money in order to do so.  A niche is all about the people.  If you want to make money in a particular niche, you have to get to know the people within the niche and what triggers them to buy in the first place.  If you can’t answer the “why” question, you’re not going to be able to connect with your audience and come across as believable.  Niches can be big or small, so to make money, you need to find profitable niches.  Here are the top 3 when it comes to online marketing:

*Weight loss/health/fitness

*Dating/relationships

*Make money/internet marketing

I’m sure some of you might we wondering, “Why are these the top 3?”  The rational is simple.  People are always going to want to lose weight, find love, and/or make more money.  We refer to these niches as evergreen because the compulsion for people to do these things will never go away.

Now, we are going to be talking about keywords or a keyword phrase.  A keyword or keyword phrase is often referred to as a tag and are the words people use in order to find a particular piece of information online.  There are two types of keywords you will see and hear a lot about in internet marketing: short-tail and long-tail keywords.  Short-tail keyword phrases are those that use two or fewer keywords.  Long-tail keyword phrases use three or more.  In marketing, we focus on long-tail because we want targeted traffic (people who have been pre-exposed to what we are selling).  The more targeted the search, the more the chance you have of making a sale.

To help illustrate how this relates to niches, I’m going to use the “weight loss” example from above.  A profitable niche will have tons of keywords that you can use to promote a product or products.  A small niche that’s not really profitable won’t.  Using the free Google keyword research tool (just go to Google, input “Google keyword tool,” and click on the first link — “keyword tool – Google adwords.”  When I input the niche “lose weight,” this base keyword phrase gets more than 11 million searches a month!  If I scroll down, I see a list of keyword phrases like “how to lose weight quickly” or “easiest way to lose weight.”

As marketers, when we talk about getting ranked in the search engines, we’re talking about getting ranked for individual keyword phrases like those listed above.  Getting ranked for just a few long-tail keyword phases is enough to make big money.  With tons of keywords comes lots of opportunities.  This is why I tell people not go to scared of going into big niches.  Well, I hope this post has helped to clear some stuff up.