Niche marketing has been and will always be a very lucrative form of marketing for affiliates.

Choosing a niche and attacking it can yield many more affiliate dollars in your pockets.

If some of you can remember back to the "old days" I used to speak and write a lot about niche marketing.  I'd like to revisit this topic as I still feel very strong about niche marketing.  Some of my good friends in this industry have made heaps of money over the last 24 months by picking a niche and attacking it.

Before we get too deep into niche marketing in the affiliate sector, let's first take a look at the definition of niche marketing provide by Wikipedia.

A niche market is a focused, targetable portion (subset) of a market sector.

By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. A niche market may be thought of as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.

A distinct niche market usually evolves out of a market niche, where potential demand is not met by any supply.

Such ventures are profitable because of disinterest on the part of large businesses and/or lack of awareness on the part of other small companies. The key to capitalizing on a niche market is to find or develop a market niche that has customers who are accessible, that is growing fast enough, and that is not owned by one established vendor already.

So let's talk about how you can use niche marketing as an affiliate to put more money in your pockets.  I see so many new websites popping up in the poker industry that are trying to be everything to everybody.  This is great if you have amazing SEO skills, or 40 hours a week to dedicate to the site, not to mention you'll need to be a master at web design and adding content.

Otherwise, you are going to be fighting an uphill battle against other poker webmasters with websites that are 5+ years old and have 1000's of pages of indexed content.

This is where picking a niche can make you heaps more money in a much shorter time frame.  One example I like to use that I personally saw from the inception, was the whole Mac Poker market.  When sites like Pokerroom.com launched a Mac friendly interface, a few of my friends grinded it out for several months in this niche and ended up dominating.

Literally around five affiliates probably captured over 50% of the Mac market  via search engines when rooms first started adapting for the Mac user.

This niche was obviously one of the biggest niches to ever hit the online poker market.  But there are several opportunities that present themselves like this every day in other markets.  The key is being on the bleeding edge, or finding a niche that allows you to have much less competition.

If I were going to build a new poker site from the ground up with a brand new domain, I would probably consider some type of niche.  Maybe I would do a site strictly about $10K event online satellites, or perhaps about the online high limit games offered at various sites.  It's hard to say without doing research.  With that said, don't just shoot in the dark.  Research what key terms, ideas, or phrases have a moderate amount of searches with a minimal amount of competition.  One tool that I have used in the past is the overture keyword tool.  It can be temperamental however and seldom gives accurate results.

The tool I have been using lately and is absolutely phenomenal is KeywordDiscovery by trellian.  This product by far trumps the overture keyword tool.

If you have an established site that already ranks well, you should leverage this existing strength by building a page or section focused on a niche market.  The thing to think about is that there are literally thousands of sites out there about Hold Em, Omaha, Poker Strategy, and oh my gosh....."Poker Room Reviews".  Although these are extremely lucrative terms, as a new webmaster you are probably wasting you time and energy.

So when thinking of new promotions, or ways to drive fresh new traffic, don't underestimate the power of niche marketing.  The principals of niche marketing can be applied across several affiliate industries, not just the poker affiliate market.  The key once again is to find something that has demand but is not being targeted by the mainstream affiliate population of that particular industry.

Hopefully this got you thinking about the new content or sites you will be working on over the coming months.