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.

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 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!

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.

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.