The old marketing concept of a niche marketing strategy has been revived in a new context by the web masters of today, and has become a hot new website creation strategy for making money online. Niche marketing is all about narrowing your target market and specializing your business. The idea is that you become very good at doing something very specific, and promote your business only to the small part of the market that is interested in your products or services. This focus gives you the opportunity to refine your offer to more closely match the needs of your customers, improve your quality of performance and to develop your reputation as an expert specialist. Niche marketing can be very rewarding. You just have to make sure your targeted corner or niche in the market is big enough to support your business goals.

Take the medical profession as an everyday example. There is not a huge market for brain surgery, but its big enough to accommodate quite a number of specialist brain surgeons, who are mostly better rewarded than the much larger number of less specialized general practitioners in the medical profession. To put it another way, the idea is to become a big fish in a small pond rather than settle for being a small fish in a big pond, where you risk being eaten by all the sharks. You can carve out your niche with specific products or services, or perhaps by specializing in serving specific customers or localities. With your focus, it is often possible to win out against huge corporations because your more customized offer better meets the needs of your customers than their general purpose solutions designed to meet the average needs of a much bigger market. So what has niche marketing to do with websites? Most internet users use search engines to find the information they want. High website rankings are awarded to websites that publish specific, relevant and quality information. Visitors to these websites give website owners an opportunity to earn an income, selling products or services, or from advertising. Google's context sensitive Adsense advertising is particularly popular with website developers. When there is a strong match between the search terms used, the content of the website and the Adsense advertisements, there is a good chance the website will earn an income from its visitors. The more visitors the website can attract, the higher the earnings that are possible. In response to this opportunity there has been a proliferation of websites with content targeting specific niches within the search terms used by internet users. The interest is, naturally, higher in search terms that generate more traffic, but to rank high in the search engines for generic search terms is difficult. There is a better opportunity to rank high when targeting more specific search terms that a still quite popular.

Interest is also high in search terms that attract more competition from Adsense advertisers, and higher costs per click. The key to success in a website niche strategy is creating sufficient unique and interesting content on the narrow subject that is targeted, to attract both a readership and higher search engine rankings. This can be a huge research and writing work load for the website developer. A popular but potentially costly alternative is to contract out this work. Another is to buy lower cost private label rights content that can be edited and adapted with relatively low effort.