Find a Niche and Nurture It

The times they are ‘a changing. As the Internet matures along with all the applications that use the medium, change is inevitable. Back in the wild west days of online marketing, which was only within the past decade, an online marketer could pretty much throw anything online to sell, and sell he could! Quality gave way to the sheer novelty of the medium and many early online marketers made “overnight” millions with little true effort. Fast forward to today. The internet world has matured and continues to get more and more sophisticated. Corporate America has brought Madison Avenue dollars and advertising expertise into the arena. But dollars alone do not guarantee success online any more than they do in the offline world. A bad idea has just as much chance of failing on the internet as it does on Main Street.

Today, competition online is fierce but not insurmountable for the marketer. Instead of easily selling a product or service to a broad customer range, it is the “niche” marketer who wins. By taking time to analyze customer needs and cater to a smaller but more focused market today’s niche marketer can be the paramount authority on a narrower subject. There is a saying about going an inch wide and a mile deep in a market versus a mile wide and an inch deep. The deeper and more entrenched you can be in a market the greater the stability and profit potential.

It does take some research to find niches that will have a big enough following to be profitable however. For example; Dog lovers is a big niche with plenty of potential, but narrowing it down to folks who love three legged, one eared dogs named Lucky, might be a tad too narrow to be profitable. Do some homework. Is there a print magazine devoted to your target group? If there is, that generally means there is a big enough market to support your online efforts.

Once you have your target market identified, court it with care. Developing a relationship with your future customers is critical to establishing trust. If they trust you, they’ll buy from you. It is more difficult to make the one-shot sale for very big ticket items. Offer an electronic newsletter, a free min-course, free articles, anything to develop a relationship. One of your best tools will be an auto-responder service. Properly set up, it will save you countless hours of work and it will put your relationship building efforts on auto-pilot. Do a search and find one you feel comfortable with. One that I like is called, AWeber. Check it out!

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