The Authentic Eccentric

So, my last post talked about niche markets. Today I’m wandering off into the logistics of making money from a niche market.

Before you can think about monetizing a niche market, you need to know it. I think you should also have a passion for it, or at least really enjoy it - to be successful, you have to feed it time, love and energy or it won’t grow. I titled this post deliberately - it takes just as much work and investment to run a good internet business as a brick and mortar one.

How do you get to know a market? Research and immersion are my personal techniques; my number one tool of choice for market research is, hands down, site build it. For new entrepreneurs looking to get started on a reasonable budget, sbi can’t be beat. I have built several niche specific sites using it and highly recommend it.

Its greatest benefit, however, is that the system sbi employs does most of the hard work of business planning for you and allows you to concentrate on the key ingredient for niche success - content. The coaching and followup is great as well - it’s the perfect tool for people without a lot of web experience to get started on.

Let’s talk about content. Want to make money for sure on the internet? Create unique, desirable content. Pictures, text, video, articles, podcasts, workbooks, tutorials, classes, You can go the info publisher route; the continuing decline in technology costs vastly increase the types of products that can be reasonably produced and marketed via digital download and fulfilment.

Just as with gardening, you have to prepare your market. Cultivate it with plenty of free and useful articles or resources on the topic. Update it regularly. Keep it organized and study your logs to see what’s popular; harvest that and turn it into saleable products.

How do you know what type of content to create? Listen to your market. Visit forums or online communities and listen for problems; Flickr was born out of listening to people who didn’t have websites but had digital pictures they wanted to share. If you can solve a problem, you can create revenue.

Tomorrow - creative content.