by Deanna Mascle, 1/6/2006

One of the biggest mistakes I see beginning internet entrepreneur's make is trying to reach too broad an audience and/or market. Yes, that's right. Just think about it.

The internet is a huge place with millions and millions of bits of information competing for users' attention. Some of those tidbits are straight-forward information but a large percentage is marketing messages. Unless you are a huge multi-billion corporation with a huge multi-million dollar advertising budget then you do not have the resources to rise above the rest. You simply cannot afford to market to the masses and you will waste a great deal of money, time, and energy in the process of your failure.

But there is a way that the small business can rise to the top of the marketplace and beat the big monoliths at the game -- niche marketing. That is why you need a niche. You can't simply decide to push cooking as your niche, for example, and hope to rise to the top of the search engine results any time soon and forget even attempting for something as competitive as diet. But you can carve out a profitable niche if you focus.

For example, I did a bit of research on cooking at one search engine. They reported 224,772 requests for the keyword cooking in one month. At first glance that sounds encouraging because now you know there is a big market out there for your market but before you get too carried away with the idea I should point out what else I learned. This one search engine also reported advertisers are paying between $1.91-.33 just for placement in the top 10. They had 64 total bidders for that single keyword.

Are you ready to compete in that market? If I can locate 64 paying advertisers with one pay-per-click resource then how many other entrepreneurs are out there with their web pages and their products competing for you for search engine ranking and web browser attention. It is depressing to even think about how far down you'll be in a key word search -- no matter which search engine your would-be audience uses.

However if you begin working on narrowing your niche just a bit you can find some openings for you to make your own mark, and your own profit, on the internet. For example, I found three hopeful niches during my investigation:

• cooking country healthy had 2295 requests in one month but has no bids by advertsers at this time
• cooking with child had 1825 requests in one month and bids ranged from $0.25-.08 with only 10 advertisers bidding
• cooking for two had 1781 requests in one month and bids ranged from $0.32-.1 with only four advertisers bidding

All three look like healthy markets to me but the competition level looks a lot easier to break into.

So how do you find your niche?