Finding Your Niche

By: Deborah K. Gell © 2003
http://websavvy.cc

Some of the best hidden treasures are what are sometimes referred to as "niche market directories" or "topic specific directories." The differences between these types of smaller resource compilations varies from mono-topic, to multi-topic, to general and all inclusive.

Finding these gems can sometimes be a daunting task, requiring hours of research just to find the choice few. The fact that these directories seem buried beneath the tide of resources in larger engines, doesn't mean they aren't worth your trouble, or that they're unknown.

Niche directories of this sort often have their own following within their industry or profession, and may provide you with traffic that's targeted to your specific market. The question is, how do you find them?

Over the years I've developed some research methods to help locate these types of resources in a shorter amount of time and with much better results.

The first thing you need to do is make an outline of your information:

To do a synonym search you simply type a tilde ~ and then the word you'd like to find "similar" word groups for.

In our example we'll use a site that sells clothing. To "narrow" or "define" our search to generate better results, we'll use some "qualifiers" to limit the parameters for better relevance.

Example: ~clothes directories +.com add URL

This search would return (clothes) synonyms for; fashion, wear, apparel, dress, and clothing, while directories will narrow what type of resource we're trying to locate, and .com will narrow the search to a specific TLD. Using add URL will help to limit and refine the search to return directories that accept submissions for your specific topic and/or subject.

Now, once you've located a few of these directories, there's another little trick you can employ to help you locate many more in the same general field. From the SERPs, choose a resource, and then using your Google Toolbar, look at the backwards links for that resource. Usually a niche market directory is listed in other niche market directories, as most of them are trying to make the most of the hub factor.

You can perform the above search using any of your meta data, the generated synonyms, and the qualifiers, in any order, and they will produce different results every time.

The TLD can be changed to find directories in any TLD such as .net, .org, .co.uk, .nz, or whatever "country specific" market you're targeting.

There are a number of different approaches to finding the very general subject of directories. You can use listings, resources, link compilations, directory of directories, niche market, topic specific, vortals, portals, vertical markets, industry specific, search engines, human-edited, and volunteer edited, along with your TLD qualifier, the synonym results, and add URL.

Using different combinations of + - ~ can produce different results to help you ferret out more resources. Whenever you find a resource that appears to be what you're looking for, don't forget to use the backwards link check, or even the "Similar pages" link, or even the "Find web pages that contain the term (domain name here)" link, on Google. You'll be surprised at what you can find using these combined methods.

The same "type" of search (minus the synonym related search) can be performed at Yahoo, ATW, and Lycos. I've managed to unearth some very good resources using the search engines, and methods, I've just outlined.

Happy digging!

Finding Your Niche

Deborah is Owner and CEO of the WebSavvy Smart Search! directory, which is a unique and valuable web directory. She has years of experience in creating Internet directories and is an extroardinary programmer.

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