The Internet is a global marketplace. That can make it difficult to market yourself, your products or your services online where you will have much larger competitors with enormous marketing resources to draw on. The way that a small operator can survive and thrive in this competitive environment is through specialization. You can do some highly effective marketing all by yourself if you have a good niche.

Choosing your niche, or defining one, is all about your passion. In the end, unless your niche becomes absurdly specific, (“my living room and my favorite pieces of furniture in it”) you will still have competitors. Who comes out on top will ultimately be decided by the level of dedication they can maintain on the topic. This is why you have a big advantage if you choose a niche that excites you and makes you eager to get to work.

Passion is very powerful, but it cannot make up for a lack of experience. In order to lead the field in your chosen niche, you also need to know all of the technical details and background information. This is particularly important if your purpose for marketing is to sell products to customers; demonstrating real expertise in the field is an important part of establishing a trustworthy reputation with potential buyers.

As mentioned above, there are great dangers in defining an extremely narrow niche for yourself. Besides the fact that your potential audience shrinks as your niche gets smaller and smaller, you should also know that competition can sometimes actually get tougher in the small niches. You may only have one competitor in an extremely specific niche, but that competitor will be a maniacal fanatic who lives, eats, breathes and dreams about the niche subject. Strike a balance when you choose your niche and stay broad enough to access a decent-sized audience.

Since the ideal niche size is large enough to accommodate several competitors, you should give some careful thought to how you want to handle them. Avoid direct antagonism; trying to increase your share of the niche by decreasing theirs is not only unethical but also tremendously time-intensive. Instead, you should concentrate on ways to set yourself apart from your competitors. Figure out what you can do that they cannot. This will give you a real advantage without playing dirty.

After you get your marketing campaign underway, it’s important to gauge its effectiveness. You can keep track of the increased traffic you generate, as well as any increase in sales if you’re marketing directly to customers or clients. If you are not seeing satisfactory improvements, you have many options available to you. Narrowing your niche down may prove effective in cases where you’re having trouble standing out and grabbing a decent share of the market.

Marketing is all about perspective. In order to be a big success on the Internet, you either have to build an enormous company with world-wide recognition or define the terms of success narrowly. Making your search engine more popular than Google would be an extremely difficult task, but making your site the number-one plumbing resource for homeowners in Muncie, Indiana is an achievable goal. What pond you choose to swim in is at least as important as how big a fish you are.