Discovering Your Niche Markets for Increasing Website Visibility.
March 08, 2011
The Professional Development Seminar is sponsoring an hour of discussion about Niche Marketing. Questions for our speakers include the following:
- How to discover a Niche Market?
- Should you use your name or a business name?
- Should you have a tagline?
These three issues are interrelated and applicable to all artists and makers. The topic is enormous! Everyone has a niche audience (or even several niche markets), we just have to figure out who they are and how to tap into the potential.
In a series of posts, ASK Harriete will tackle these issues and how they impact website visibility for artists and makers. This series will include tips for Search Engine Optimization (simple and easy to understand) without technical talk offering ideas that you can readily implement to bring more visibility to your website.
This post is devoted to Discovering Your Niche Markets for increasing website visibility.
Driving traffic to our websites is not a passive activity. It isn't effective to simply put up your website and wait for traffic. "If I post it, they will come" is a Hollywood dream.
Driving traffic to your website takes some effort to find niche markets. This is the creative part but, we need to raise our consciousness to see the opportunities. It all revolves around, What will interest other people?
Don't just look at the art and craft world for interested viewers. The identifiable art/craft world is small and rarefied. However, if you think about all your activities and topics, I bet you will find multiple niche markets for your work. Somewhere out there in the Long Tail of the Internet, there are people who don't know your work and how amazingly relevant it is to their interests.
Here is a recent example of discovering a niche market and then driving traffic to my website that actually prompted this post.
I am in the final phase of a four-year project constructing a gigantic bell curve entirely out of pencils -- quite literally, thousands of real pencils. The work is a commentary about the impact of standardized testing on education.
A few weeks ago, a curious-looking pencil caught my eye and I happened to do a quick Internet search. To my amazement, I learned that it is a "collectible" pencil. What a surprise? It never occurred to me that one pencil may be worth $30 to $45!
Then I realized another of my pencils was printed with a pencil collector's name, address, and the American Pencil Collector Society. Now looking further online, I learned that there are blogs about pencils and pencil collectors! Who would have thought that this pencil niche existed!!!!!! This is the Long Tail in the shape of a long skinny pencil!
My first Internet search discovered pencils.com. They normally feature a pencil artist every Monday. They said, "Although you're not drawing art with these pencils, you are creating art right out of pencils!" This resulted in a feature post on their website about my artwork titled, "Pick Up Your Pencils, Begin."
If you read their short post about my pencil sculpture, you will see more niche marketing. Pencils.com used the blog post about the featured artist (me) to bring more visibility to two of their "niche markets" - collectible pencils and a link to selling pencils for taking standardized tests!
While the artist feature post on Pencils.com about Pick Up Your Pencils, Begin may or may not result in a purchase of my work or an exhibition opportunity, you never know. Maybe someone will invite me to exhibit my pencil bell curve at their pencil convention. Now that my awareness of pencil associations is raised, I looked online. There are pencil conventions all over. Imagine that? More untapped niche markets.
In addition, the blog post on pencils.com is driving a bit of extra traffic to my website. The more traffic to my website, the higher my ranking. The higher the ranking the more people will see my artwork about pencils...
The web has a Long Tail, and I am going to ride that long tail where ever it goes.
How can you make The Long Tail work for you? Can you think of a material, color, design, subject, or any other aspect that is unique to your work? Try doing a search. The blossoming of so many blogs and websites about the most arcane of topics means that they are looking for entertaining ideas for their readers. Your work may become the subject of an upcoming post!
Seriously, time to put your thinking cap on. Have you considered the many possibilities to find your Niche? Are you ready to ride the Long Tail? You might find new customers, clients, collectors, or exhibitions for your work that you never expected.
Stay tuned for more ideas and discussion for niche marketing, business names, and taglines. Pro and cons please get ready to weigh in with your opinion.
The Long Tail is an affiliate link and definitely recommended reading for learning how closely connected the internet and niche markets really are for your work.
This post was updated on January 27, 2022.