Go Niche!

One way to guarantee failure of your Internet business is
to try to be everything to everybody.

Unless your pockets are incredibly deep, the broadbrush or
'mall' approach won't work for your small business. The cost
to advertise to people across a large number of interest
categories is prohibitive; and untargetted, unfocused
visitors don't buy products.

To attract focused, interested visitors, you yourself must
become focused and interested in your subject matter.

First you pick a topic, and then refine it. And then you
refine it some more. And some more.

Let's say that you're a sports enthusiast.

You know that millions of people are also interested in
sports, and you'd be willing to bet that 'sports' would be a
lucrative niche and search term to advertise, right? Well,
you're right on the first count, but you'd lose money on
second.

Let's check out the demand using Overture's search term
suggestion tool:

==>
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Although Overture reported over 800,000 searches for the
term 'sports' in April 2003, and you can have the top
listing for the term for a 'mere' 21 cents, how many sales
might you expect to generate with that popular term?

Not many!

Even if only one percent of that 800,000 searchers visited
your site, and you had the top listing at twenty-one cents,
my guess is that you just wasted $1,680.00. The term 'sports'
is just too unspecific.

If while doing keyword research using the search term
suggestion tool at Overture, you looked one line below
'sports', you'd see that the second entry is 'sports car'
with more almost 200 hundred thousand searches, or one
quarter of all the searches that included the term 'sports'.

The key is to find what people want, and then give it to
them. Simple, eh?

So let's take your interest in sports a step further and
define it as particular interest in the spectator sports;
baseball, football, soccer and hockey.

How about sports trading cards? They're small to store as
inventory and inexpensive to ship, which makes them a good
mail order product.

A quick peek at Overture reveals that searches in April 2003
for 'baseball cards' exceeded 42,000, 'sport cards' had
10,338 queries and 'sports memorabilia' was searched for
10,649 times.

Come up with a list of highly targeted keywords and you'll
soon reach that lofty number of 800,000 .... but all of whom have a
specific focus, and a PROVEN interest in your product.

Set yourself apart even further.

Rather than competing directly with ten or twenty
advertisers at Overture who also sell trading cards, you
could write a report or small ebook called "Collectors
Secrets Revealed: How to Make a Fortune with Sports Trading
Cards". Not only would you sell the report from your own
site, you could also joint venture with some of those other
advertisers and have them promote your report on their
sites. Everybody wins!

After the ball is rolling on your sports card trading site,
it's time to build another niche site in a non-competing
topic. And then another. The key to success for small online
businesses is to build a number of highly targeted sites
across a diverse array of topics. Therefore, if one topic
experiences a seasonal or market-induced drop in traffic,
the others will continue to generate income.

Yes, the niche marketing method requires somewhat more
effort than building one site with a hundred banners, but
it's also the method that makes a profit. Either way takes
work - you might as well make your work profitable.