What make a hobby into a business?
Is it the size of the market, the penetration of the market segment, or both?
I’m a big believer in the long tail of marketing, selling less to more – you can read more about it here or stick around for my thoughts 🙂
Although economies of scale help Amazon thrive as a long tail retailer (can I coin the phrase longtailer?) a smaller business needs focus and enough of a marketplace (or marketplaces) to be profitable.
This is where a good online marketing strategy can level the playing field and help find profitable fish without wasting too much ‘bait’ – in this case bait = $$$.
Creating custom landing pages or microsites is relatively inexpensive, it takes good copy / content and either distinct URLs or subdomains that target specific niches that may be close, but not exactly the same.
I’ll stress the obvious… content is king. In fact, content is king, queen, jack of hearts and every other picture card you can think of. I’m the first to admit it’s not easy to create niche and differentiated content. Copywriting is an art, and writing copy for the web that satisfies users and search engines (which is pretty much the same thing) is a Leonardo DaVinci kind of skill. The good news is, is that content doesn’t have to be perfect to be ideal.
Unique is key to niche marketing copy. Marketing to the niche of niches requires a good understanding of the subject, and a perceived or real expertise, opinion or concept that is unique within that subject.
For example, if you want to have a niche on the best bait for catching trout, can you provide expertise on the correct bait for trout? Can you provide a special kind of trout bait that no-one else has, or the insider knowledge to help people cultivate / build / capture / ferment their own?
BTW: Do I sound as if I know nothing about bait? The only time I went fishing was on the Canadian side of Lake Huron, didn’t catch a thing, and drank beaucoup beer we sneaked across the US/Canada border… I digress.
Once you have the content, building a strategy around ‘getting it out there’ is much easier, and something that has systematic (and fairly consistent) steps to follow.
Landing pages, microsites, Pay per Click, linking, on page / off page SEO, they’re all processes that build traffic, but without great, unique and valuable content, you’re leading that traffic up a dead end street.
Looking for niche profit? Find the content within, then get it out there.
Author is a better online marketeer than fisherman. No trout were harmed in the writing of this blog.
