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.