Whatever the nature of your enterprise it is almost certain that you operate in a precise niche and this is good news because exact positioning in the internet bazaar is where online marketing works best for small business. Billions of services and products are sold on the internet, so you want to identify a niche that allows you to position your business in a positive way to an existing, receptive market – and the best way to identify a profitable niche is to find an unfulfilled want; then fill it. Even if tens of thousands of others in your industry understand your area of expertise, perhaps you have a unique spin, slant or twist that will make your offering stand out and shine above the others.
What You Must Do Before You Start
- Identify your niche market;
- Identify your niche customers;
- Identify the produce or service the niche market and its customers want.
Don’t Try To Sell Everything To Everyone
The cardinal sin the major players were guilty of in the spectacular crash of a few years back was that they all set out to sell everything to everyone; everything they thought that everyone
needed. Their
profligacy cost them and their backers millions upon millions of pounds. It cost them dearly because they considered niche markets too small, too insignificant, too expensive to reach, and too slow to develop in the reckless drive for immediate returns to match their massive investment. They were wrong in every way; they paid the price; they bombed.
Don’t Risk Failure Before You Start
It’s sad, but even today the vast majority of online businesses still manage to fail before they actually begin because 98 per cent of them don’t know how to go about choosing a niche.
They make one or other of two huge mistakes:
- Mistake no. 1 – Targeting a market that is too broad
- (e.g. Trying to compete with Amazon.com by selling books or other common household items online)
- Mistake no. 2 – Targeting a niche that is overly saturated
- (e.g. Trying to get a foothold in the ‘Internet Marketing’ or ‘How To Make Money Online’ niche)
Information Outstrips All Other E-Commerce Niche Purchasing Options
This list says it all ...
Top 5 E-Commerce Niche Purchasing Categories
Information products outstrip all other e-commerce niche purchasing options and this opens the door to you in the development of your own online marketing plan. The list, incidentally, is extracted from a Forrester Survey (the internet research arm) of online buying patterns for the year 2004.
The Secret Of Success
The secret to long-term success online is to position your strategy in tiny – but popular – niche markets that have little or no direct competition, and then create and sell digitised information products to these niches.
People Buy What They Want, Not What They Need
That’s it then in a nutshell. When people go online to buy, they buy what they
want; not what they necessarily need or what other people say is good for them. Allow me to illustrate with a true story that dates back long before we had colour television, mobile phones, or the internet.
How Niche Nous Sustained A 50-Year Career For A Famous Bandleader
The famous bandleader Joe Loss was a master at finding out what his niche customers wanted and as a result stayed at the top of his profession for over 50 years. When Joe and his orchestra played in provincial dance halls he invariably used his break time for market research. While the band members sloped off for a beer, Joe mingled with the patrons enquiring after their
current tastes in popular music. He did so because he never took for granted that what was hip today would necessarily be so tomorrow. Joe always had his finger on the pulse of cyclical change and frequently bucked the trends that other
bandleaders followed unremittingly in the mistaken belief that they knew which musical styles dancers
needed.Joe knew his niche market inside out, knew his customers, and always knew how to give them exactly what they wanted. He knew because he
asked them, and so too can you ask your customers, not face to face but virtually, as you will discover.