The money is what we’re here for. However, if I’m right and you choose a niche that appeals to you, then you’ll be there for the fun. The lesson to be learned is that every niche has profit potential. Consumers have the ability to indulge themselves greatly thanks to the capitalist system and instant gratification offered by the Internet. Let’s look back at some bizarre, outlandish ideas that should not have made money from in the past.
Flying Spaghetti Monster
The meme that roared. This is a joke meant to make fun of organized religion. This mock “deity”, now has its own brand, complete with bumper stickers, T-shirts, video games, and other products.
Pogs
These were from the 1980s. These were just plastic tokens with designs and played a small sidewalk game like marbles. Children started collecting, trading, and playing with them. A good example of a niche trend is trading, collecting, and playing.
Orgami
After you have sold everyone enough paper, it would be difficult to market the Japanese art of paper folding. Instead, it can be monetized like other minor hobbies, such as needlepoint and soap-carving. You can trade diagrams, instructions, or ideas for new models. Software that can be used to create new shapes, such as a desktop folding lab, is available for purchase. A niche hobby.
Firefox
Of course, the famous free web browser! You might be wondering how you can make money by giving away your product for free. You simply need to code a Google search box in your browser, and Google will pay you for the promotion. Firefox has over 25% market share and is growing! Firefox is the new version of Netscape’s browser. Google Adsense offers a deal that allows you to place a “get Firefox button” on your website and earn one dollar per customer. This makes Firefox the most profitable Adsense keyword.
Remember the car example in the first chapter, where I discussed selling Fords and Toyotas. Your marketing strategies for the product will remain the same, even though you have chosen the Toyota market niche. The cars will still be displayed on the lot, offered test drives, and priced competitively.
Your greatest asset will be your imagination and creativity. You might be able to follow others’ lead in mining niches for riches. But, after all, niche marketing isn’t something you were interested in because you follow the crowd. You’re not in it to follow the crowd, but because you believe you can make your own way.
Using very basic methods, we will investigate the potential profitability of this niche. You can come up with your own unique idea. However, I cannot quantify the process. The standard channels that can lead to profit potential are what I can quantify.
Hunting is thrilling
In Chapter 2, I mentioned niches that I had discovered. Remember my experiences with Nethack, ANSI art, and Nethack? Let me be clear with you: there is almost no way to make a lot of money from either of these topics. These topics are not going to help you make a lot of money. Click-throughs for your ads can make you a lot of money. My site is a geeky one. My site’s fringe elements only get a small portion of the traffic. Only when I combine an interest in many topics within the general category of geek interests that I get decent traffic, is it possible to get decent traffic. These were niches I had discovered, not ones I made money on.
This is something that many sites do. Boingboing.net, damninteresting.com are two sites that focus on the presentation of niche topics. These sites are intellectual playgrounds and galleries full of curios. Although you might think it’s trivial to knit niches together, if you’ve seen the Boing Boing front page you’ll be able to see that this is one of the most powerful traffic sources directed at your site for a whole week.
What are we looking for? High-demand markets with low competition. Yes, it’s possible to achieve that ideal, but that is a foolish thing to insist upon. You might be smart, but there are not enough fools around the world to guarantee that vast markets will remain untapped. There is always a way to make money from it.
We’ll focus our efforts on a highly-demanded market with little competition, but we’ll also understand that a niche market is at best a small thing. A bonanza can be created by combining several niche markets. If you keep up to date with all the information available, you may be able to get into a niche market at the right time when it is hot. Consider the website that is lucky.
Start promoting the iPod. YouTube is a site that was not even known two years ago. Upload videos and make comments. Google then buys the site for $1.65 billion two years later! Wouldn’t it be great to have YouTube as our channel?
It’s worth paying the fee to maintain a blog on places like Blogger.com for “fishing holes”. You can get a free hit counter that tracks all incoming searches. Write a short post about a niche topic. In a few days, you will be able to see if your blog, which is low in rank, has received an additional 50 hits per day from people searching for the topic. This indicates two wonderful things: at least some interest and low competition. You wouldn’t get any hits if there wasn’t enough interest. You wouldn’t get any hits if there was too much competition. This is because someone else has already created a massive site SEO optimized to the maximum to get all the hits.
Reality Check
We don’t just create a new specialty and then sit back in smugness. money is the other half. We need to find an area with all three of these characteristics.
- Low Supply: Very few people have ever thought of opening a business in this area. This is why it’s such a niche.
- High Demand: Obviously, it’s not too high. Or we’re living in the clouds. It won’t be of any benefit if no one cares. It’s not a niche if there’s no interest.
- Profit potential: It is important to ensure that you can make money from it.
Search engines can be used to search for your keyword and the top keywords and phrases that are associated with it. Low hit counts are desirable. Use the buzz indexes and search engine watches to locate topics of high interest.
Look for businesses that are already in the niche to find potential profit opportunities. You could also consider a niche with business models that you can easily adapt. You can also do what the pioneers in this chapter did, and create your own business model.
You can create a brilliant business plan from almost nothing. Although it’s not possible, it is worth considering. It doesn’t matter if there are more competitors than you expected. You might have room for another seller.
If the demand is lower than expected, don’t get discouraged. You can still promote your product and create interest in areas that haven’t existed before. Vegemite might not have been a household name if you are American or British. But, now that I’ve mentioned it and you’ve done a Google search about it, it’s likely you’re at least curious enough to give it a try. What could be more wrong than 20 million Australians?
It’s much easier to turn interested into profit. Although the niche products may not have any wealth potential, the interest can still be made into money. In the next chapter, we’ll be looking at the idea of being ad-supported by content about the niche and creating a product in that niche.
