Niche Too Small? Make It A Business!


One of the possible mistakes a new Internet Marketer makes when
looking for a good Niche Market is not looking at the big
picture. Or they approach Niche Marketing as a one product
project, and not as a business. If you use the business approach
you can often eliminate the too small issue.

There are three basic requirements for targeting any specific
group of prospects. Ignore any of the three and you will not
succeed in Niche Marketing no matter what your approach. But
let’s look at the example below with just one product, and maybe
even a low cost product that only generates $20 profit per sale.

The first step is to find an area of interest that has a
sufficient number of prospects, our topic for this article.
Number 2 is to find a cost effective way to reach out and touch
this target group. And the third is to either solve a problem or
provide a currently unavailable solution that is attractive to
your Niche. But we’ll just stay with number one for this
article.

Many people associate the word Niche with small, which
depending on your definition of small could be true. But how do
you determine just how many searches and corresponding prospects
is too small? Therein lies the tricky part. You need enough
prospects to make the Niche profitable based on whatever product
you plan to offer. The smaller the target group, smaller the
number of possible sales.

My most successful method has been by using the same methods I
use to determine the profitability of any PPC campaign. Even if
you plan to use different ways to market to your prospects, PPC
planning can give you some very real numbers to access the
possible revenue. You can also use a PPC campaign to test the
waters and see what kind of interest there may be in your
planned product.

Let’s say your favorite search tool showed that there are
10-12,000 monthly searches on your product area. That may sound
like a lot of searches but it may be a little deceptive. Let’s
setup a few givens to illustrate our case. Say you have a lot of
experience with PPC campaigns so you can write a great ad and
produce a good landing page (or web site if you want to go to
the direct sell – but most experts don’t recommend that).

So you fire up your account at Google Adwords or Yahoo Search
Marketing. You place your ad, put in several groups of 20
keywords then do your estimates to establish that your cost per
click is reasonable according to your profit margin.

And your ad is flawless and gets over a 5% click through (5
clicks in 100 views or impressions). Dividing our 12,000 monthly
searches into daily searches gives us 400. So you get 20
visitors per day or 600 per month. If your web site conversion
rate is also high (since you are an expert), you convert 5% of
your visitors to buyers.

That’s 30 buyers per month. Now depending on your click costs
(say .30 for this example) you have $180 invested in your
marketing (this doesn’t include things like product development,
web sites, etc.). 30 sales per month might be good if you make
$200 per sale (that’s not impossible – I’ve seen a lot higher).
But what if you only make $20 profit per sale? Even with that
low of a profit you make $500+ monthly profit.

But unless you have secondary products and a good ongoing
marketing method you just hit the wall on possible profits.
That’s why you should always approach Niche Marketing as an
ongoing business, and not have to worry about the small number
of possible sales so much. You know that you will sell
additional products and hopefully create an ongoing relationship
with your buyers.

You still need enough to break even or make a small profit on
your first sale. But if you have a good line of secondary sales
items to offer then even a small Niche can turn into great
monthly income. So if you use the building a business approach,
you can create an ongoing stream of income.

When doing research to find a Niche to market to, make sure you
can find or create more than one product and go for establishing
a long-term relationship with your prospects and buyers. Even a
small Niche can produce great income over the long haul.