Your "target market" is the sub-niche of people you are aiming at reaching, and the way you do this is by creating excellent content aimed right at solving the problems their searching for a solution for online. One of the main elements you need to know how to do effectively, is knowing how to research your target audience online, so you know what their drivers are and what will cause them to either become a lead for your business, or to buy something you offer right there and then.

The best thing you can do to research your key target market online is to use a tool called www.Website-Buildit.com (the company SiteBuildIt) they have an entire suite of tools that allow you to uncover sub-markets of tight, reactive and ready to buy customers. So instead of creating your website first, and having a message that basically talks about "who you are, what you do and why you're so good!" and hope that some of the visitors to your site end up buying or inquiring, you need to work with much more savvy to get results.

As a business person you probably understand the principal of target markets and that "not everyone" is going to be interested in buying your product or service. So it wouldn't make any sense to marketing to everyone out there would it?

What are the two most important things you need to know for targeting your ideal niche market?

1. Who is your target market exactly?

Here are some just some of what you need to identify for your target market (the more specific you are here, the better your results are going to be), try identifying what gender they are, their age, location, income bracket, what their culture is, are they religious, and also their political views.

So during this entire process, you need to take each general area and really break it down into micro areas, in essence you want to understand them so well, that you feel like you've walked a hundred miles in their shoes so you can talk right to their problems and push their hot buttons.

2. What are their main motivations?

The next step you need to know, and I would go as far as insisting that you "MUST" know these details are: Are they driven by pleasure or pain? fear of love? What do they need most and why? Are their hot buttons purely desire? Or are they emotional, purely functional or a mixture of both to achieve a certain outcome? And probably the most important of all questions you need to nail here (and once you understand this and use it well, you will have a thriving business... THRIVING!) what are they willing to do, sacrifice, give, overcome or endure to get what the solution to what it is you offer, what does it mean to them to have it?

When I do a market analysis of any online (or offline) market niche, what I've found works and is indeed imperative for your success in understanding your market place is to firstly, try and become the "perfect client' who would buy or strongly qualify as a hot lead for your product or service. Create an exhaustive list of what you think the characteristics would be and then we go onto step two.

The second part of identify and really solidifying your target market so that you don't address to wrong niche is to create a survey and then go out to the market place and start asking the real market place. Be thorough, don't breeze through this phase, and a great place to get numbers and results fast and thoroughly is by using online advertising like Google Adwords, that's right, throw a few hundred dollars at a campaign and send them to a web based survey that you create with an online program such as www.SurveyMonkey.com
If you take this information above and use it the right way, right down to the deepest levels and follow it through you cannot fail in the long run, if you do it means you've either not been thorough in your research, or you have given up along the way or not used the tools as described.

So go out and get stuck into micro-niching your exact target market for every single service and product you offer, you WON'T be sorry!