Many newbies hear about the riches that are being made from websites in popular markets like insurance, poker and real estate, to name just a few, and decide to target these markets themselves. Unfortunately, however, the harsh reality is that however well-designed their website may be, the vast majority will never make any significant income from these markets, because they simply do not have the experience or the required knowledge to be able to compete with the big players in these popular markets.

The big money-earners in these markets, ie those people whose websites are at the top of the search engines for the most popular keywords, will inevitably have years of experience and will probably have thousands of links pointing to them to keep them at the top of the search engines, and because of their high profits will almost certainly have a large advertising budget as well. Therefore this is why I always recommend to people new to internet marketing that they should start off by targeting smaller markets and concentrate on dominating that smaller niche market first of all.

The major advantage of niche marketing is that in most cases your competition is significantly reduced, meaning it's a lot easier to start earning an income from that smaller niche market, and it's certainly easier to rank higher in the search engines.

It's important to note that in my experience most webmasters who run websites in these smaller niches will only have a basic grasp of SEO, and will almost certainly not be experts in this area. This even applies to the top ranked sites in these particular niches, so if you can take some time to read up on SEO and learn some of the techniques, you'll be surprised to see just how easy it is to get your website ranked highly in these smaller niches.

Let me demonstrate by showing you a real-life example. After spending a little bit of time on keyword research I've discovered a keyword phrase that, at the time of writing, gets 21,365 searches every month on Yahoo alone. The term is 'peach cobbler recipe', and after searching on Google and Yahoo, the two main search engines, it's clear that it would be fairly easy to rank highly for this term within just a few months, with good onpage search engine optimization, and a good link-building campaign.

The competing sites already at the top of the rankings, with the exception of the two top-ranked sites all have a low PR (page rank) of 3 or less, so this means that they don't have a large number of quality links pointing to their site. Therefore as it is fairly easy to obtain a PR of 4 or higher, just a basic grounding in SEO will enable you to outrank these sites and get on the first page of results. It's a fairly safe assumption to make that the webmasters of these current top-ranking sites, as I've mentioned before, are probably not experts in SEO.

In this example, you could monetize your website by selling related cookbooks as an affiliate, displaying ads, or you could simply offer a newsletter where people could receive recipes and offers from you, which would enable you to market to these people over and over again and earn profits this way.

The message that I want to get across is that there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of untapped niches out there. It's just a case of going out there and finding them.

You will have far less competition in these smaller niches, and therefore you could easily become a leading player in numerous niches over time.

It's not all about SEO either. People are becoming more and more accustomed to buying information products online, and they are doing so in all kinds of niches. Therefore you could fill a niche by creating your own information product and marketing it to this niche. You could then offer a generous commission to affiliates to promote the program for you, and, if carried out successfully, this would allow you to make a very nice income from this niche without having to build a website and spend time optimizing it until it gets high search engine rankings. You can simply advertise it yourself, or better still allow your affiliates to advertise for you.

So to conclude, just go out there and fill those smaller niches. Some niches will already have attracted the likes of myself, and other experienced marketers, but the world is constantly evolving and new niches are appearing all the time, so there's no excuse for not finding your own profitable niche market.