B3-CH08 – Discovering Your Niche

What’s your niche? Don’t say “music”. That’s hardly a “niche” you could ever hope to dominate. You need to be much more narrow than that. “Pop music” isn’t really a “niche” either. You need to be a heck of a lot more specific. Knowing EXACTLY what your niche is will be your BIGGEST shortcut in all your commercial – and artistic – endeavors.

You must stop everything else you’re doing and FIND OUT NOW.

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Going any further with your music BUSINESS will be severely hampered if you don’t know your niche, simple as that.

Who exactly is it that gets the most excited about your music? And don’t count your mom or best friends. You need to know that your music connects best with a particular demographic, because only then can you narrow down your targeting.

And why is that important? Not only because it will help you fine-tune your music and your message, but also because it will make ALL your promotions, SEO and web development not merely more efficient but also substantially cheaper. It will also result in much higher conversion rates for everything you do.

Since I don’t know your particular music, I can’t advise you on the specifics of what your niche is – other than telling you to look around, take notes, ask your fans all you need to know about them, and then develop a “profile” of your typical (or most represented) fan.

In this section I will therefore give you a “marketing angle” on how to discover your niche using Internet-based tools. The added advantage of this will become apparent to you later on as you start injecting secondary income streams into your music business. Each new product or service will also need to be targeted very narrowly, so knowing the methodology which is applicable to ANY niche will be most important for you.

So let’s have a look at a more generalized process of “niche discovery” now.

Some niches are extremely lucrative, others very obscure and difficult. But I can almost not imagine any niche that is “impossible” to monetize online. You’re into 80’s-sounding girlie pop with acid jazz elements? You love mushroom picking? You a fan of the X-Box? Perhaps you love books on specific topics? Or watching cool movies? Or trading rare stamps? Drawing pictures? Anything?

Whatever you decide to get into, just make sure you love it enough to stick with it for a good while.

Researching your niche isn’t hard at all. Firstly, since you already know quite a bit about it, you already have an “idea” of how popular it is around the world. But don’t take your own opinion on it as fact. CONFIRM IT.

The simplest way to research your niche is by visiting the Google AdWords Keyword Planner (formerly known as the Keyword Tool). You need to create a (free) account with Google, if you don’t already have one. It takes less than a minute, and – you’re ready.

Once you open the Keyword Planner, enter your “seed keywords” into the keyword box.

A “seed keyword” is a phrase which you believe people will use to find things about your particular product or niche. So, if you’re trying to establish who might be interested in a three-piece girl group that looks like Destiny’s Child but sounds like Dixie Chicks on acid, your keywords might include:

• New music
• Music like Dixie Chicks
• Destiny’s Child look
• Acid jazz pop
• Pop jazz fans
• Dixie Chicks fanclub
• Indie jazz pop music
• Independent pop jazz music to download
• And so on…

No need to type “all” the keywords you can think of. Anything between 10 and 20 seed keywords will do. Now ask the Keyword Planner to generate some ideas for you.

You will be able to view “keyword ad group ideas” and “keyword suggestions”.

They’re the same keywords, but they’re just organized differently. You can now sort the keywords by the number of exact searches (by clicking on the heading) and you’ll get a very good idea of how popular each given keyword is. If the average number of searches is about 2,000 or more per month, per keyword (on “many” keywords), then you’re on to a potentially very lucrative niche. If there are at least some keywords with “commercial intent” – all the merrier. (I’ll explain this more deeply in a moment).

Now that you know how popular your niche is, you need to confirm it. You do this by following these two simple steps:

1. Check your competition
2. Check the trends

Naturally, there are many other ways – some very elaborate – to check all of this, but the method I’m giving you here is very effective and easily sufficient for the vast majority of cases.

To check your competition, visit Google Search. And then type your best keywords in quotes. For example:

“buy acid jazz” (note the quotation marks around the keyword – also note the clear commercial intent in that keyword: “buy”)

As I’m writing this, buy acid jazz returns 27,400,000 pages on Google while “buy acid jazz” (in quotes) returns 121,000. (These results will often vary a little bit when doing searches, but the broad ranges will tend to remain consistent.)

Look at the number of returned results IN QUOTES. THAT is your “organic competition” for that keyword. You can also, and indeed should, look at the “competition” column within the AdWords keyword planner as well as the “average CPC” column. Those two tell you something about how much competition you have on the PAID traffic front within your niche. The “organic competition”, on the other hand, is the amount of FREE competition you have.

If the numbers are large, hundreds of thousands or millions – that’s ample confirmation that MANY people are interested in competing with you. It may also be a signal that competing here will be difficult – at least initially. But don’t get discouraged too quickly. There are always alternative long-tail keywords!

Next, visit Google Trends. Type in your 5 main keywords and look at the graph. Have the keywords been dropping in popularity (and if so, is it “too much?”), or have they been stable – or have they, perhaps, been growing?

Finally, also visit SpyFu and look at who is currently investing in your best keywords and how much they’re paying.

You now know that the niche you’re hoping to conquer is vibrant – or not. Unless you’re in some really obscure niche, chances are that the results will be positive for you!

One more thing I highly advise you to do is to look for existing forums and blogs specializing in your niche. The more of those you can find – the merrier. Enter something like “acid jazz forum” or “acid jazz blog” and take notes of their names and URLs! And then check the popularity of those forums/blogs using Alexa rank and site info.

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Book 3 – Chapter 7Keyword Research	Course Overview	Book 3 – Chapter 9Your Real Chances

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