Once you have a niche market, everything else is very basic. This is a good thing because it means you must act quickly in new niche markets. If you wait for months to set up your strategy, it invites someone else into the fray and establishes themselves in the niche you should have.
You might consider keeping an “emergency kit” to quickly establish a skeleton site and then figure out the rest. It would look something like this:
- You can either park a few domain names or you can use capital to quickly buy domain names.
- You should consider using a web host. You can also use a blog or MySpace site as a base to quickly optimize your new niche.
- A website template that is “ready to use”. We don’t need anything fancy, we just want to drop in a placeholder.
This is just a side note. It’s the real work of deciding how to make that potential profit into cash. You can make money online by selling products or advertising with affiliates.
Others who are selling a product. You will require less content if you are selling a product. Instead, your focus should be on the use of the website as an online shop front to sell your product. You will have to be purely focused on content if you choose an ad-supported website.
The Product Model
This one will be our first. You don’t have to manufacture tangible products to own a product. You can offer services, information, group memberships, ebooks, and subscriptions to newsletters as your product. You can use CafePress (http://www.cafepress.com/) or another online service to print up T-shirts, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, and other promotional materials associated with your niche. These are some niches that I might consider to making a product.
Coin Collecting
- A service for auctions – Charge membership fees or a percentage of the sales. Let members join your site and bid on coins and currencies through your auctions.
- A series of ebooks – This is the area that is most in need of information. Collectors of coins are always looking for information about the market, the best cleaning, care-for grading methods, as well as the markets and markets for their coins. A whole book could be published on the history and care of US coins.
- Subscribe to our newsletter and keep up-to-date on numismatic events, conventions, and other news.
- Promo materials – it’s a good idea to put some designs on some T-shirts. A wall poster featuring images and descriptions of specific coins would be even better.
Manga
Manga is a Japanese comic or graphic novel. It’s similar to the Anime film genre. This is a very hot market in America right now. It is rare to walk into an indoor mall bookstore without seeing a manga rack.
- We’re talking about collectors, so we have again created an auction site that allows members to trade, buy, and sell manga books. There are many manga artists in America interested in creating manga. To see my point, you can Google the phrase “how to draw manga”. How about a membership board for artists, illustrators, and publishers where they can collaborate and hire one another??
- Perhaps notebooks but video tutorials on how to draw manga or a magazine with articles about the manga market.
- Promotional materials You must promote your products to young people. This includes T-shirts, stickers, posters, and stickers.
Reptiles
Naturally, reptiles can be kept as pets. This niche is very small but it’s very strong. You should be able to accept some competition, although it’s not overwhelming.
- Newsletters, ebooks, and videos on exotic pet care. This topic is not well covered. I have owned a few snakes and lizards in my lifetime, but there isn’t as much information available on them as there is on mainstream pets.
- Promotional materials – Even for niche pets, Petsmart can show you that every calendar and pen with the image of a Komodo dragon or Chameleon has been there. Pet owners love to express their affection for a particular species. You will be hard-pressed to miss the pet lover’s cubicle in an office!
We must emphasize that you don’t need to be a writer, artist, web developer, or any other type of person to create these products. Instead, you can go to one of the many freelancer websites on the Internet to hire writers, artists, and designers for a job or a steady stream. In later chapters, we’ll go into more detail about this. Now that you’ve mentioned it, you might consider hiring a programmer for software design that is related to a niche. Perhaps a game based on the niche is a good idea (great idea for manga). You could also use it as a record-keeping tool (coin collectors spend lots of time sorting and categorizing coins).
The webmaster model and the hiring of freelancers is the most popular way the Internet does business. The usual cycle is: the webmaster purchases sites, investigates topics on these sites for business models, and then distributes the work to freelancers.
They then put their efforts into the site and leave it to make money while they move on to other sites. This is the same as having multiple niche topics that add a steady percentage to your bottom line. Business brains and creativity are rarely inseparable. People who are creative have a lot of talent but not enough knowledge to make it sell. While businesspeople are able to use their sales skills to figure out what to sell, they lack the creativity to make it happen. Although this is not always true, it’s a common way of doing business.
The Content Model
This website is supported by advertising. The Internet is full of well-worn phrases like “Content is King”, which is true. Remember that the Internet is multimedia just like radio and TV. There are many ways to share content:
- Text – Blog posts, articles, and databases. Tables, references, and more.
- Images – These images can also be sold as products. We saw in Chapter 3 how Star Trek fans search for wallpapers and images.
- Audio and video – Flash animations or other video formats. Audio files can be either a podcast, a type of live audio recording that is posted to a blog, or a product such as cell phone ring tones.
- User-generated content is often the main attraction. Other visitors will if given the chance, be more than happy to provide content via chat rooms.
Bulletin boards, blog comments, etc. Slashdot, Digg, and all the rest are user-generated content.
We have the main reason to concentrate on the text. Search engines cannot index any other content (beyond the title, of course). While we all look forward to the day that we can Google for sound clips from an hour-long YouTube video, until then, we will have to improve our keywords and content in order to attract search traffic.
You can also outsource the task and delegate it to freelancers. In a later chapter, we’ll also explore the content model. We’ll actually explore how to use the social web to build traffic and get links. Let me add one thing: blogs!
Mix and match
You should not draw a line between the product model and the content model. Instead, make it a fuzzy line. Your site can have ads, products, and partial content all in one. Let’s not forget that you are targeting a niche market.
Let’s say your interest lies in the Renaissance lifestyle. SCA – The Society for Creative Anachronism is a great place to start if this is something you are interested in. You attend Renaissance Faires and Festivals in your area, you have friends there, you are interested in history, you might dress up in costume at events, gatherings, or even Medieval.
Crafts and hobbies include acting, woodworking, juggling, and astrology. You’re now a niche market searching for a place that will make it happen. After searching the Internet, you have found a great website devoted to your niche. It’s a good start.
You can also offer a “full service” option. You can offer articles and a blog about the topic. Ads on the blog and links to T-shirts with logos that appeal to your interest. You’ll see the point.
