Have you heard Internet marketers mention phrases like “target market” or “niche market” and wondered exactly what they were talking about? If you want to be successful creating and selling information products online, you need to understand exactly what these phrases mean. The same is true if you expect to launch and maintain a successful blog.

Imagine you have come up with the most delicious tasting hamburger recipe of all time. Even your vegan and vegetarian friends you convinced to take a bite admitted it was the tastiest food they ever put into their mouths. Dreams of overnight success and a million-dollar bank account fill your mind, and you purchase a food cart.

You prepare and cook a bunch of best-ever hamburgers and take to the streets. You have a very simple sign that says “Best Hamburger Ever”, and you travel up and down every street in your city offering your product. You can’t believe it, but something strange happens.

You make a few sales, and those customers rave about your hamburger, but you don’t do anywhere near as well as imagined. After a few days of this, you can’t afford to stay in business, and your best-ever burger recipe is relegated to your home kitchen.

What happened?

The problem was that you offered a very specific product, a beef-based hamburger, to anyone and everyone. You never took the time to understand the niche market for your product that would perform extremely well. You also didn’t focus your efforts on a specific target audience. Without knowing it, you were following a formula that dooms many online and brick-and-mortar small business owners and tabletop entrepreneurs.

To keep similar business failure from happening to your blog or information marketing business, you need to get started in your business by understanding the …

…the Difference Between a Niche & a Target Audience

Bloggers, Internet entrepreneurs and information product developers come in all shapes and sizes. Their levels of success vary, as do the products and services they offer, and what they would qualify as “success” in their businesses. There are also lots of different advertising mediums, methods to drive traffic, and other virtual and real world tactics and strategies to build an online business.

Regardless how you are attempting to grow your blog’s
visibility, or increase the success of your information
product business, there is one thing you definitely have to
know – the difference between a target audience and a
niche market.

Though they are frequently used interchangeably, these phrases are not the same, not by a long stretch. They are both crucial to building a successful online presence, and are definitely related in some ways. It is fruitless to try to target any group of people until you have established the special niche you will be working in. Accordingly, you cannot be successful in any niche market without targeting your marketing to a very specific, laser-focused audience.

Here is what you need to know.

A target market is the group of people you think will buy your information product or benefit from your blog. This is the area of the ocean in which you decide to swim. It is the market you are targeting, thus the name. In the best-ever hamburger example above, you would be well served to do plenty of research before ever attempting to sell your first burger.

Your target market is the WHO part of your marketing equation.

Figure out who exactly wants to buy your hamburger. This will probably not be people trying to lose weight, someone on a very strict dietary approach that limits or totally forbids meat consumption, and those concerned with cruel labor and animal practices in the meat processing industry.

Your research may show you that men prefer eating hamburgers over women, with more men than women consuming hamburgers regularly by a large margin. You could also discover that men between the ages of 18 and 35 eat more hamburgers than other men. What you’re doing here is called creating an “audience profile” (more on this important marketing step in a later section). In this imaginary example, your target audience would be men between the ages of 18 and 35.

Okay, you are getting closer to selling your hamburgers. However, you are not done with your preparations yet. If you simply go out and approach every man between the age of 18 and 35, you are going to do better than you did previously, trying to sell your hamburger to anyone and everyone. Still, you will not reach the level of success you can when you define your niche.

If your target audience is the WHO of your marketing efforts, your niche is the WHAT.

What is your unique story? What does your brand look like? What experience are you selling? What problem or solution are you offering to your target audience? There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of restaurants and diners around the globe that claim to offer the best tasting hamburger in the world.

Those burger sellers should identify their niche, as well as the uniqueness of the product they are offering. They need to outline their particular brand, what it looks and feels like, and their specific approach to solving a problem or answering a big question for their target audience. Until they develop a niche within their target market, these business owners will never realize the maximum potential of their marketing efforts.

Here are a couple more examples of niches and target audiences.

  • You have a fitness blog.
  • Target audience – Women over 50
  • Niche – Women over 50 who want to go from couch potato to marathon runner in less than 1 year
  • You are an information product developer.
  • Target audience – People who want to make money online
  • Niche – Online business beginners that want to sell physical products on Amazon

Remember, identify your target audience first. This is “who” you will be marketing to. Then separate your business from the competition by identifying a specific problem or need you are solving or fulfilling. Create your brand around that niche, the “what” that makes you unique when compared to the competition in your market.

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