Archive for December, 2006

[ratings] 

The current niche model that every other marketer
is teaching has major issues in my opinion. It
is more of a method to create disjoint mini businesses
(I am taking a risk by calling them businesses) that
could potentially generate revenue individually.

Let me explain this…

Based on the above “poor” model, you search for a niche
that has some decent search activity every month.
Let’s say you figured out that there is demand in the
“How to increase your BMW 323 Horsepower by 20%” niche 🙂
so you go ahead and you setup your minisite around
this topic. You create an ebook to address to this
problem and you are all set. You write a killer sales
letter, drive traffic to the site using SEO, adwords,
link exchange etc…

If you are smart you are also building a list around
your topic.

Let’s assume this site was a success and you start to
generate $2,000 per month. great.

Now you are all done with this site, it runs on “autopilot”
(or so you think) so you move on to increase your
bottom line  by repeating the process.

So, you do your research again, and you decided to create
a new site on the topic:
“How to groom your Golden Retriever” (that’s a dog
breed if you never heard of it 🙂
Repeat all of the above and assuming that was a success
you now make $4K a month. Cool huh?

Yeah! Cool but also dangerous…

So now you have 2 totally unrelated products (not
businesses I repeat) and you also have some kind of
mailing list to keep in touch.

However, the time you start your new project, you
immediately start losing focus of your other site. Your list
will slowly become unresponsive because you are too busy
to email them regularly.

In other words, your previous sites, will hit their peak
and start dying a slow death.

But you don’t see that because you are now working on
your unrelated project and you are too excited about it too.

Eventually you end up with a bunch of unrelated sites, you
struggle to maintain all of them, some die, some are
still active but not to your satisfaction.

With this model, you will need to keep coming up
with new ideas, build new projects all the time
in order to stay alive (Some will succeed, most will not).

Congratulations! you found your self a JOB!

The above example is based on the assumption that you
will be somewhat successful

Here is how I visualize the concept of a “Niche Market”

A niche market is not any other than a small segment of a larger
group of people (market) that are highly interested in a particular
topic, for a specific reason.

A Niche is found based on market research to determine
How to *Market* to that specific group.

Your Business is Not a niche. A niche is to help you
market your product efficiently and effectively.

Your business can be broken down to many Niches but
Many Niches doesn’t mean that they constitute one business.

I know this may be somewhat confusing so let me
explain this with examples…

In our example from above:
“How to increase your BMW 323 Horsepower by 20%” could be a niche.
But a niche of What type of business?

Think about it for a minute…

Think bigger…

It could be a sub niche of an “Automotive Performance” niche
which is a niche of an “Automotive Business”

However, in our example you decided to move away from this
*business* before you even started to scratch the surface
of the potential you had in growing that little niche
to become a real giant.

The problem started when you set your mindset to believe
that you are in the:
“How to increase your BMW 323 Horsepower by 20%” biz.
So you believed that you cultivated that business and it
is time to move on.

My Way of looking into this could have been:
“I am in the Automotive Business” and now I market
a product on “increasing horsepower” to a specific niche.

Instead of moving to the “Pet industry” with my dog product
I could have created another product about
“How to increase your Mustang GT’s Horsepower by 20%”
and I could go on creating Horsepower products about
other type of cars. I could then move onto trucks…

Meanwhile I have been building a huge list of car performance
fanatics, ready to buy my products every time.

I would use my existing list to jumpstart my new product
sales because it’s a related market.

Then I could have created
a product about “How to add a turbo-charger to any car”
and all my list (BMW, Mustang, truck etc) would be interested
in. So I start my new project knowing that I will start making
sales immediately with very small effort.

I am now building a real business and I am using the Niche
concept to market to the crowds adding people to my
marketing funnel. The growth is exponential. (not linear
like in the poor model)

Take a look at Dell.
Dell is in the Computer Business. Michael Dell started out
by building computers from parts and selling them directly
to the consumer by eliminating the middle man.

Dell has since grown to offer servers, laptops, PDA’s etc.
However, they market their products to different niches of
the computer industry. They even have different specialists
in every single one of their niches marketing the same
products to them in a way that appeals to that specific niche.

A Small business owner is approached and marketed to in
a different way than a larger corporation and in a different
way than a student. Note: These are the same computers
they sell…

Bottom line…

A Niche is not a business. It’s a smaller segment of your
market where you use it’s specific characteristics to
market to it more efficiently and effectivly by specializing.

Also, a niche is not something you get in and out of every
other month.

Build a REAL Business.

Till Next time,
Partner to Your Success,
-Socrates Socratous

[ratings]

Posted by: Socrates Socratous