Here’s another brilliant, and unsolicited guest post from our buddy Brian. He offers more great insights into how you should approach your market research. Thanks, Brian. Great stuff as usual. – Mark
Whenever people ask what I do these days, I just tell them I’m a drug dealer.
I know, I know – I’m copying Tim Ferriss, but it’s far easier than explaining what I actually do.
I work in a niche that no one else in the internet marketing game knows about. There’s nothing about it on affiliate networks (I’ve looked), and although there are “real” companies with products and services, they don’t know anything about online marketing.
I used to think there was something wrong with me because I wasn’t promoting ringtones, fat loss, dating, or making money online offers.
But over the past year, I’ve realized how beneficial it was to start out in a truly niche market.
The Problem With Starting in a Huge Market
Having spent almost the past decade in Silicon Valley, I’ve seen firsthand some incredible companies.
All of us have probably dreamed of founding the next Google – or at least climbing to the top of the internet marketing world.
But it takes a very long time to succeed in a huge market saturated with competitors. That’s true regardless of whether you’re trying to start a real company, or simply trying to rank for a keyword with 1 million searches per month.
Although I’m in a very niche market, my most general keyword still gets a couple hundred thousand searches per month. I now rank on the first page of results, but it took me over a year of dedicated effort to get there.
If you look at the successful people in large markets, most have been there for a long time. They’re not “better” than you, they may not have more content than you, but they have been around longer than you.
The Advantages of Starting Smaller
I fell into my niche randomly – it was just a topic I happened to know a lot about, and one day I decided to start writing about it.
This proved to be a good decision. Within a year’s time I was able to completely dominate the market. Sure, there are other companies out there, but online I am the only game in town.
When people ask questions via social media now, they’re always pointed directly to me – because there is no other competition online. I don’t even have to proactively market myself anymore.
In my earlier article, I wrote that one of the big challenges with starting an online business is the lack of immediate feedback – unlike being in school or working for someone else.
Although it’s still not “immediate,” the feedback you get in a smaller market comes more readily and therefore motivates you more effectively.
The Problems With a Smaller Market
The main problem with starting in a smaller niche? The market size can be limited.
You need to do some testing before you jump in blindly – if there truly is no competition in whatever market you’re thinking of, that’s probably a bad sign.
In my case, there was competition – but I saw an opportunity because most of it was offline.
Your market doesn’t need to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars to be lucrative. Mine is a fraction of that size and I still make a five-figure monthly income.
But you do need to be sure it’s a niche in which people are actually looking for solutions and/or buying products.
How to Think Big Even in a Small Market
Even though my niche is small, I’ve expanded across several different sub-markets.
Let’s say you were going after dog training keywords. That’s not even what I would call a “small market,” but let’s just go with it.
You might start by going after one dog breed or one behavioral problem, and then expand into other breeds and other problems. Each time you expand, you have an existing audience and links that you can use to make your next venture more successful.
Many people new to making money online try too many projects in wildly different areas, putting a half-hearted effort into each of them.
But that doesn’t work for me. I’d rather start with Coke and expand into Diet, Cherry and Vanilla rather than trying to launch a soft drink business, a line of clothing, and a night club.
And Sometimes Think Even Bigger
Even if you start off in a small market, you don’t need to stick with that niche forever. You could use what you’ve done as “proof” to show what you can do and to attract other partners to work with.
I’m doing that right now – I’m working with a partner to create an offline business (think: live training boot camps) to go along with what I do online.
But to do that, you need to have “proof” that you can succeed first. And that’s much easier to get in a small market – just as long as you think big the whole time.
Tags: finding a niche, offline marketing, online market research
Another great post.
I would not want you to reveal your niche here, but I am curious if you have some examples of niches that are similar to yours from an online potential perspective?
Thanks<
Mark
Mark,
I’m not sure offhand because I haven’t done the research, but think about anything that is marketed mostly offline to consumers and has yet to have a real presence online.
In particular, think about anything with a high barrier to entry – something that not anyone can just learn about very easily but which requires a lot of time and money to learn and/or connections, advanced degrees, etc. The higher the barrier to entry, the more curious people will be.
Awesome post and great thinking!
“Think big in a small market” – Brilliant!
Thanks a lot mate, a milliondollar post!
Ion
Inspiring. Diving deeper into realms of know-how that we never considered marketable, research the related keywords, see what happens. Thank you.
Great post. I wish I had done this starting out.
I’m a drug dealer!
Nice post Brian,
“I’d rather start with Coke and expand into Diet, Cherry and Vanilla rather than trying to launch a soft drink business, a line of clothing, and a night club.”
- when you said that, are you saying once you build a site on Coke, you will build more sites on related ones like Diet, Cherry and Vanilla OR you just expand that one site of coke by adding other brands. In other words are you talking about one site or multiple sites.
Congrats on your success. Keep it up.
Roger I know Brian’s business and can tell you that he’s likely talking about adding the Diet Coke, Vanilla Coke, and Cherry coke to his existing site.
I’m actually doing a bit of both these days, but Court is right in that I started by adding to my existing site.
I started with one very specific service, then added a few others, now have my own products, etc. and am launching some new sites around the same theme soon.
Very good post and very true. I started (and stayed) in a highly popular niche and it was a long uphill battle for me. In the end I made it, but I would advise anyone just getting started to start in a much smaller niche.
Good points. I’ve also noticed another problem with a small niche.
Getting any kind of promotion from people is like pulling teeth. They’ll send me free products out the butt but when it comes to links they’re like that little ugly dude with that ring on LoTR. Whatever his name was…
They just aren’t very net savvy in that niche, but slowly starting to realize the value of working together.
Yeah, getting people in my niche to cross-promote is like pulling teeth because no one understands affiliate marketing.
With a niche where people don’t understand the internet, you have to rely more on word-of-mouth and offline tactics – message boards worked really well for me since there are very few similar content sites.
So how long would you recommend testing a niche before you determine if it is going to be profitable or not? It takes some time to set a site up, build backlinks, get ranking from G and other SE’s. How long should you wait before deciding to move on?
Also, I have a question for the group at large. It appears that my sites I build with a domain name and WordPress get indexed faster than those I build on Blogger. Has anyone else noticed this?
The best way to test it Larry would be with PPC. $100 spent to test a niche out could save you A LOT of time and in this business time is money. Mark just ran a test with PPC to test a new market that he hadn’t tried before and got great results, so he created a product and hit that market – very smart.
I’ve been told I don’t give props often enough and only comment when I’m being critical so, instead of reading and lurking I figured I’d let you know I really enjoyed this post.
It’s easy to jump on board whatever the popular trend is at the time (in fact I’m discovering I may have done that with my current blog as it seems everyone’s jumping onto the topic of flipping) but being able to “think big” in a smaller market or niche can be really difficult, but profitable if you manage to become the authority or dominate the market as you’ve mentioned.
Again, great post!
This is a great post. I think most people trying to make money online really do forget that each method they try is really a ‘business venture’ and should be given the appropriate focus, attention, hard work and research that any business venture or project deserves to be successful.
Starting in a small or tightly-focused niche doesn’t mean the project has to be small in ambition. My take on starting to make money online is that every project you undertake needs to have a very clear project plan, meaning: clear description, outline of implementation, desired outcomes, metrics for determining whether to expand/kill/rework the project from results. The more tight you target a niche, the easier and more obvious the project plan becomes.
It’s way too easy to get distracted even when you are in a small market niche. I’m in a small niche myself and have caught myself side-tracking way too soon and way too often. The key is patience and perseverance. Stay with your plan and don’t go chasing the branch business until you’re ready.
I agree completely with this sentiment. I am seeing my some of my biggest successes areas that have little to no competition.
And I think that many of the smartest people have dropped out of the “just follow me to get rich” game, and have gone into business for themselves: just…making…money.
I am more of a believer than ever that a lot of things are better left unsaid publicly. That way, the hordes don’t come stomping in and ruin opportunities so quickly…which takes some pressure off the search engines to spend as much time battling new angles, etc.
In other words, there can be a high cost to blabbing everything one learns in exchange for a few bucks in affiliate sales, AdSense clicks, etc.
It’s not easy niche,i spend $600 on google adwords,but it i get back $200.
I started small with ehow, and so far it seems like there is definite potential.