March 2010
M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Mar
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

A network marketing niche

Posted by: maryk on Wednesday, February 4th, 2009

I remember being totally clueless about just who my ‘market’ was when I first got involved with network marketing. That was before the advent of all the affiliate marketing touted online, filled with it’s talk of ‘niche markets’ and sub-niches and micro-niches, oh my… but essentially, the same question needs to be asked… Just who the heck are you marketing to?!?

Since it was a slow dawn for me I thought I’d take the time to share what a network marketing niche is in simple terms. The whole idea of finding a hungry niche and developing relationships with those people had me baffled and frustrated. Don’t know why that was the case but there you have it… so if you’re already clear about this then clearly, this particular post is NOT for you… carry on.

A niche market is simply a group of people that have some particular demographic in common. Now, that could be age or gender, but for our purposes it would more likely be a hobby, interest, or NEED. Simply stated… it is the group of people that share a need (or desire) for your product or service. Not so complicated is it? The funny thing I’ve noticed about the majority of network marketers… at least new network marketers is that they are initially quite convinced that THEIR product/service is ‘needed’ by EVERYONE and EVERYONE will love it! Not true… and not a good approach to marketing either!

So what is a better approach and how does it apply to my network marketing business? Let’s look at a market within a market… in other words, a sub-niche. Perhaps your large market is women, a sub-niche may be adolescent women, married women, women who are moms, menopausal women.

Network marketing works better when you target a sub-niche… and works best when you target a micro-niche. An example of a micro-niche under the sub-niche’s mentioned above might be adolescent women with acne, or married women interested in reviving their love life, or women who are new moms, or menopausal women who use hormone replacement.

As you may have guessed by now… you can drill down even deeper within any of those and come up with micro-micro-niches, getting closer and closer to the person who truly has a strong need or desire for your product. For instance, the adolescent woman with allergy-triggered acne.

Now… how do we connect with those people? For the sake of keeping this post length reasonable let’s stay with online marketing. (It may trigger an inspired thought or two about where to go in your community in order to do a bit of offline marketing too ) Marketing online consists of sharing information through your writing and when you’re writing using key words that catch the attention of the people likely to need your product.

Using the example above, let’s say you carry an allergen-free skin care product designed to relieve acne. So it would benefit you to start being seen as an ‘authority’ on this topic and solution. The way to do that is to write articles, post about it in your blog, create webpages filled with content about this issue and then gently lead people to the solution you offer. The idea here is to just pick a product or two that your company offers… or one aspect of the service you offer… and speak to the people looking for THAT.

Then you stick around to learn more about how and where to share the links to the information you are making available. That entails both gaining a presence in social online communities to develop relationships and taking advantage of social media sites that get support you getting listed high in the search engines so people who are looking for the information can find the information YOU have to share.

Until then… stay connected!

~~Mary K